Incompatible System (Mass Effect AU)

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Spoiler: Fanfic Disclaimer

The fanfiction I write is entirely for fun, with no commercial use implied, intended, or permitted. All original copyright holder’s rights are acknowledged.

More specifically, as a basic, non-exhaustive disclaimer for main line or omake story elements currently used to date:

Mass Effect is the property of Bioware and others.

Basically, if you recognize it from a movie, comic, book, or other published work, it’s owned by the rightsholders for that work. Anything else is my fault.

Reader contributed Omakes may incorporate other elements not listed above, and are otherwise © their respective authors. And much thanks is due to those authors for adding to my and your enjoyment!

Does anyone even read these? Does anyone even care about these?

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This introduction may change as time goes on, as I will answer common questions and address issues here, as well as announce the status of the story should it change. Check here first if you have any queries. I can't promise that you will always find an answer, but I'll try

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This bizarreness is the end result of a discussion on Discord with various friends about how one could utterly break the Mass Effect universe with a fairly simple change at the right point. I did a chapter for my random odds and sods thread, just for fun, and it was received pretty well. The idea kept nagging me so I did another chapter of it. After that I intended to get bacl to lizarding responsibly, as is my wont.

However that little itch at the back of my mind, the one that isn't caused by the mosquito bite, kept on poking me, so I did another chapter. This makes the verbiage enough to warrant a thread of it's own, so here is that thread.

Note that I cannot guarantee how often this will update, although I'm fairly sure it will update on occasion. But I do have two other stories in progress along with actual work-for-a-living issues, so I need to occasionally do those things as well

Now, note that this is once again not going to be anything like canon ME, or indeed the vast majority of fanfics based on that. I have never played the games, although I've read a fair few stories set in that universe, and have extensively read the wiki (looked at it when I needed to know something, given up, and asked someone who has played the games) so this must, obviously, be considered pretty heavily AU. But then all fics are, in one way or another, and the most interesting and entertaining ones usually take canon, crunch it up into a ball, and shoot the ball.

Out of a cannon.

In any case, there won't be vast amounts of pointless ground battles with every single shot fired laid out in numeric format along with the specs of all the weapons. I know some people love that sort of thing, but I find it immensely tedious even to read and it makes me almost cry thinking about writing it... If you need that, there are a lot of stories that have far more than enough of it to satisfy anyone Nor will there be, ideally, lots of stupid aliens who keep doing stupid things while stupid. That said, Turians are a thing, and the less said about Batarians the better. Even the Turians would agree about that.

Nor is it an HFY story, as it's often put. Certainly not in the normal way. It's more of a HOFTI story if anything (Humans? Oh, fuck, they're insane!) Which is slightly ironic because for reasons that will become clear as time goes on, the humans feel exactly the same about everyone else...

Anyway, hopefully people will enjoy it. If not, please don't feel that you have to spend hours complaining about it, because that won't do anything except frustrate you and amuse me Best to find another story and move on, thereby saving a lot of effort all round.

As always, I will say the following, my standard boilerplate for a story:

I'm always open to corrections, typo spotting, math error checking, and all sorts of things like that, and I like hearing ideas about the way things could go and suggestions for interesting scenes. Or even simply discussing the story. Make a good point and I will probably use it in one way or the other if I agree with it.

On the other hand I will ignore demands to change parts of the story to fit your particular likes. This is not in any way meant to be rude, but the first rule of fanfiction is the same as the first rule of life, which is:

It's entirely impossible to please everyone at the same time with anything.​

Trying to do so is an exercise in frustration for all involved and therefore pointless. I would rather concentrate on writing the story rather than arguing about how to write the story, especially as that is a zero-sum game in the first place.

Bear in mind that this is an alternative universe, which means that some of the canon powersets may work in slightly different ways if it made it more convenient for the story. Most are meant to be more or less unchanged, though, so it's not impossible I made a mistake. If you aren't sure, don't worry about asking for clarification, I don't mind at all. I respond well to polite questions and genuine interest in why something happened the way it did.

With that out of the way, we shall begin...

 

[mp3.1415player]

Spoiler: Original chapter introduction for the historical records

So this came about due to a few weird ideas, and a discussion or two on Discord over the last couple of days...

I'm not a great fan of the Mass Effect universe for a number of reasons. There are some interesting fics set in that but a hell of a lot of them devolve into monotonous descriptions of ground battles, and crossovers are often worse, since most spacefaring variants of humanity would roll right over the ME people like they were speed bumps. Anyone with a BOLO backing them, for example, would make mincemeat of the Turians Yet for some reason this seldom seems to happen...

But the idea came up to see how things would turn out if a version of humanity who had their own tech that was as incompatible as possible with eezo tech happened to arise. This is the start of that, although at the moment I'm not yet sure if I'd take it any further. It was mainly because once the idea bit me I couldn't put it down until I'd made a few words around it

September 2058, Toronto
Institute of Advanced Physics
Department of WIMP Research

“Huh. That’s… odd.”

“What?” John Warden, double PhD in theoretical quantum mechanics and applied mathematics, looked up from his console, while issuing the mental command through his neurolink that made the projected screen vanish. He preferred to look at a real world screen for much of the work he did, although the mindscape version was more common. His colleague Amanda Jeffries, who had three PhDs in even more esoteric fields, plus a Masters in spintronics, was staring at her own screen with a baffled look on her face.

“I think we have an instrument error,” she finally said, shaking her head.

He got up and walked over, stopping behind her to peer at her display. She pointed.

“Huh.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I know.” He bent a little closer. “Scroll back to time index… minus ten?”

She did so. He inspected the results, as did she, then both of them exchanged incredulous glances. “That’s impossible,” he said in a faint voice.

“Completely,” she agreed. “But...”

After a few more moments of bemusement, they set up to run their experiment again. The main system was still chilled down from the last run, so they didn’t have to wait to do a helium purge, which could take hours. The end result was ninety minutes later they were comparing the new data with the original set.

“What the everlasting fuck is going on?” John finally exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air. “This goes against practically everything we know.”

“It’s repeatable, though. And…” Amanda was staring off into space, thinking.

“And?”

“And it’s not entirely incompatible with supersymmetry. We’ve known since the last upgrade to the hypercollider that under the right conditions some very odd things tend to happen. Maybe this is an extended version of that...”

“How do you mean?” He looked at her, intrigued. She was a world leader in spin theory, and if she said something was connected to it she was quite likely right. Ever since supersymmetry had been proven in 2032 and shown to be the lowest level of physics possible, trumping even quantum mechanics, people like them had been refining the theory and building more and more complex hardware to chase down all the possibilities of it.

The new understanding of physics in the last twenty six years had already allowed fusion to finally be cracked, and led to a new paradigm in fields as diverse as computing technology through medicine to astrophysics. Even gravity was showing promising signs of being fully understood and possibly controllable. The first tentative unified field theory had been published by a European consortium only the year before and so far was standing up to scrutiny.

But this… this was just bizarre.

“Well, if these readings are right, there was a temporal and spatial displacement of our particle beam of nearly minus five femtoseconds over a small zone in the Z axis. The beam wasn’t there for that distance.”

“But although the temporal misalignment registered on the side detectors, the beam actually arrived at exactly the right time. So if it really did go back in time, which those readings say happened, why do these readings tell us it didn’t?”

“Actually, it arrived too soon by just under half a femtosecond, based on the actual distance between the emitter and the primary target, see? The elapsed time shows superluminal travel.”

He stared, did some mental math, engaged his neurolink and did them again with its aid, then finally nodded. “Which is impossible. Again.”

“Ah,” she said, making another projected screen pop up to the side. “Not quite. Mind you, this is only a hypothesis at the moment, but the way I can see it working is if there really was a temporal shift.” The projection filled with equations, which he followed with interest. One constant jumped out at him immediately.

“Oh my god.”

“You see?”

“I do.” He stared in amazement. “And the numbers check out exactly. Holy shit.”

Amanda shrugged, also looking at the screen. “We need to test it again a few times to rule out equipment error for sure, but this is incredible if it’s real. And if it isn’t, we’ve got one hell of a bizarre malfunction going on.”

“OK, we need to increase the Z axis too, and see if the effect follows the change in distance. If it does, that rules out some possibilities for error.”

She nodded, getting up and walking over to their enormous and very expensive experimental machine which filled the entire end of the large lab. Patting it tenderly, she smiled. “Let’s make history together, DMITR.”

“You’re very weird, Amanda,” John chuckled.

“Hey, humans pack bond with anything, you know that,” she grinned. “And when you’ve been working on something for nearly a decade, you get attached to it.”

The Dark Matter Interaction Test Reactor merely sat there humming very, very faintly, but in John’s mind the hum was rather satisfied.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

July 2063, Toronto
Institute of Advanced Physics
Department of WIMP Research

“Set up for run… one thousand four hundred and twelve.”

#Parameters set, detectors ready, charge status at 100%# the lab AI immediately said through the neurolink. It wasn’t particularly smart if looked at from a general purpose standpoint, but it had vastly quicker reflexes than anything human could hope to manage and in its narrow field of expertise was a savant-level genius. John nodded in satisfaction and turned to Amanda, who was standing behind him along with two of the other people who had been brought into this project in the last few years. One was Doctor Philip Black, an expert in ultra-fast measurement systems and particle beam generators, while the other was Professor Jennifer Diaz, a dark energy researcher.

“We’re ready. The new detector arrays are reading back in the green and the increased beam power is allowing us much finer control. Anyone want to lay a bet on the outcome?”

“Not at this point,” Philip said with a small smile. “I’ve seen too many runs now. Just do it.” Jennifer and Amanda both nodded.

“Get on with it, John, stop trying to add an air of mystery to the whole thing,” Amanda added with a long-suffering sigh tinged with fondness.

“Hey, we’re breaking entirely new ground here, we should be taking it more seriously!” he exclaimed with a grin. “No one but me thought that putting a few Jacob’s ladders around the place was a good idea. And I want a big knife switch to throw. That’s how you’re meant to do mad science.”

“You… are a somewhat strange person at times, John,” Jen said with a shake of her head.

“He’s seen way too many movies. Go on, start the run, before we get bored and go for lunch.”

“For Science!” John said, poking a button on the manual override.

Nothing happened.

“Ah.” He looked embarrassed as his colleagues exchanged looks. “That’s not switched in. Execute test.”

#Test sequence 1412 initiated,# the AI, still nameless after the nearly six months since it had been installed a result of the increased budget their project had attracted, said in a completely calm voice. All of them were connected into it via their n-links. #Sequence started… Power rising to firing threshold… Threshold reached, firing beam.# A muted thud came from the innards of the DMITR and they all felt a slight sensation of cold go through them, the real world fringe effects of a WIMP beam in action. Oddly enough, it was almost impossible to detect on instruments but the human neural system appeared to react to it readily, for reasons that were so far a mystery even after a decade of study. The only thing that was known for sure was that it was harmless, if disconcerting the first few times.

#Test sequence completed. Beam terminated, recoil energy reclamation at 99.689%. Temporal shift measured at expected value to the limit of detector accuracy. Accelerator at standby. Results of test are available in log file.#

Issuing a mental command with the absent ease of someone who’d had an n-link since he was fourteen, John looked at the holo hanging over the console, as did the others. Graphs in various colors expanded and spun as they all examined the results of the test, with the AI filling in details on request. Nearly two hours passed, until they ended up sitting around the table staring at the final outcome.

“It has to be right. All the numbers meet the theory to an accuracy that’s way past chance at this point,” Amanda said.

“I’m not arguing that,” Philip replied. “I designed those detectors, and I stand by my work. But this is an incredible discovery and I want to be certain we haven’t overlooked anything. There are Nobel prizes aplenty in this, after all.”

He looked around at the others, who all nodded.

“I agree,” Jen put in. “I’m also incredibly excited. We’ve made the single biggest breakthrough in dark matter and dark energy research in history.” She pointed at the holo in the middle of the table. “That confirms so many theories, and completely demolishes others. When this gets out, the effect is going to be...” Trailing off, she finally finished, “profound.”

“And then some,” John smiled. “It closes the last questions in the GUT, in a way that no one saw coming, and the ramifications of what we’ve found… I can still hardly believe it even after nearly five years.”

Amanda was inspecting the various graphs that were the outcome of over fourteen hundred increasingly complex tests on the phenomenon they’d initially stumbled across while looking for something entirely different. All of them converged towards a final set of equations that were elegantly simple and entirely non-intuitive. Sending a few commands to the AI, she waited as it ran through trillions of operations a second for nearly two minutes solid before rendering terabytes of data down to four lines of symbolic math.

She cleared the display and enlarged the final product, setting it slowly spinning in characters of gold. “That, people, is going to change everything,” she said quietly and with wonder in her voice.

“You know people are going to claim we’ve invented time travel or something, right?” John chuckled.

“We did. Not that you can use it for that. The exclusion principle forbids interaction with anything prior to the present, and the rebound factor means you always end up back where you started from in under one hundred and fifty microseconds anyway,” she said, still watching the equations twirl. “Genuine time travel is impossible. This is better.”

“Yeah, it is,” Philip nodded, also watching the display, a tiny smile on his face. “If we’re right that it can be applied macroscopically.”

“The theory allows it, as far as I can see,” John said. “Mind you, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more research to work out how to do it. We’re barely touching the beginning of an entire technological revolution that’s going to take years to even get properly stuck into.”

“Worth it, though,” Jen smiled. “Very, very worth it.”

“We need to talk to the administration, write up the initial paper on all this, get our names in the history books, then figure out how we actually use it. Funding is going to be needed. A lot of funding,” Amanda commented, lowering her eyes to the others. “This facility cost forty two million dollars and is barely enough to show the effect. It’ll take billions to turn it into something useful.”

“Crass commercialism raises its ugly head over the beauty of theory, as always,” John said with a sad expression, causing her to toss a small tool at him. He ducked as he went past and grinned. “If we’re really right about this..”

“I want to accept my Nobel Prize in another star system,” Jen said firmly.

Amanda looked once more at the display, then blanked it. “That just might happen,” she replied with a sensation of extraordinary satisfaction in her heart.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

April 2075, Toronto
Institute of Advanced Physics
Department of Superluminal Drive Technology
Jeffries-Warden TBT Drive Control Center

#All systems report ready, Doctor Warden. The test craft is holding at T minus ten seconds. TBT drive power is at initiation threshold. Phobos base is standing by.#

“Thanks, Dmitry,” John replied to the calm voice of the AI in his head as he studied the various holo displays around the large room, and the more personal ones inside his mindscape. The two dozen people present were all doing much the same thing, although it was mostly the computers doing the actual monitoring of the experiment. He turned to the woman standing next to him.

“Seventeen years to get here,” he said with a sigh. “I wondered at times if we ever would.”

“I had faith in our people, John,” Amanda replied softly. “But I know what you mean.” She looked around. “If this works, the things we’re going to do over the next decades are going to change all of us beyond belief.”

“Hopefully in a good way,” he muttered. “We don’t want a repeat of the Quick War.”

She shook her head sadly, thinking of the way so many people had died in a few minutes of insanity nearly fifty years ago. The world was still rebuilding itself from that, and entire countries had ceased to exist in their original form. Luckily it had stopped as fast as it started due to the quick thinking and deliberate sacrifices of some very brave people. And the end result was a much more unified world that was far less tolerant of the sort of ideology that led to such things, with any luck permanently this time.

“No, we don’t,” she agreed. “We came far too close in thirty-four. That’s why this is so essential. We have a couple of hundred people scattered around three research posts on Mars and the Moon, and a few thousand in the orbiting habitats. That’s not enough. We need to put a lot more people in a lot more places just in case the lunatics take over the asylum again. Next time we might not be so lucky.”

John nodded, then turned to the people on his other side, who had been engaged in a low conversation of their own. “Any time you want to go, Colonel,” he said to the RCSF man who represented the people who were actually flying their experimental craft, currently five hundred kilometers over their heads. “We’re ready here.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Colonel Park, who despite his name was only one eighth Korean and didn’t even look that, replied. “A moment on a par with Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, I feel.” He looked tense, but confident. Turning to the small group of people in RCSF uniforms who were monitoring their own displays, he checked they were all happy, then opened a channel to the test ship.

“TBT control to Pathfinder. Lieutenant Williams, you have a go for drive initiation,” he said to the air, his n-link relaying the words to the distant spacecraft.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“TBT control to Pathfinder. Lieutenant Williams, you have a go for drive initiation.”

Alexis smiled broadly, feeling that she was on the precipice of a new age.

Or, possibly, a horrible let down, but she was an optimist and ignored that possibility.

It would work. And her name would be there alongside Gagarin and Armstrong.

“Thank you, sir,” she replied. “TBT Drive initiation in ten seconds… Nine… eight...”

She counted down even though the computer was keeping a much more accurate tally, and was the one which would actually fly the ship. The pilot was basically there as an observer, mostly because even now after more than a century of computer autopilots, certain quarters still didn’t want the human out of the loop. She was one of them even though it was mostly because she just enjoyed flying, especially experimental craft.

It was one hell of a rush.

“Three… Two… Initiate!”

Her n-link was feeding her all the readings from around the small spacecraft, the data integrated so tightly into her sensorium that it was almost like she was the ship. She felt the drive pass the threshold and generate the enormous WIMP flux, and felt it invert the resulting TBT effect to put the ship inside the field rather than outside. Even as a rush of purely mental icy cold something went through her physical body, her expanded senses twitched as the entire universe seen through a wide variety of sensors… jumped.

And she was somewhere else.

“Fucking hell it worked!” she screamed in jubilation as she looked at the red planet in front of her, which certainly wasn’t the Earth.

Then she frowned. “What the hell is...” she managed, staring at the pinprick of strangely iridescent blue-white light that had appeared on the surface of Mars almost directly below and ahead of her, less than a second after she’d arrived. It was growing at a ferocious rate, covering a distance that must have been measurable in dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers in seconds.

#Massive gravitational waves detected from unknown source,# the ship told her in tones of warning. Even as it did the craft shuddered hard. #Inertial dampening at maximum output. Reactor at maximum output. Gravitational waves increasing in amplitude, recommend acceleration at full power to clear danger area.#

The blue roiling ball of fire was now rising into the thin atmosphere of Mars, lightning flaring around the edges, in a sight that was simultaneously one of the most impressive things she’d ever seen and hands down the most terrifying. Without even consciously deciding to do so, she ramped her AG drive to maximum and lit the fusion torch, the ship accelerating at over a hundred G outwards from the planet, only the local frame of reference generated by the inertial dampener field keeping her from being pulped.

“What the fuck happened?” she whispered to herself in shock as she fled for her life. And she desperately hoped that whatever the hell it was had been far, far away from the small Martian outpost down there, because it was blatantly obvious that whatever it was wouldn’t have been survivable for anyone in the general area. Or possibly on the same hemisphere...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

“We got lucky, the blast was almost diametrically opposite the research station, so no one was killed,” Colonel Park said as he sat down in the conference room. It had been a very worrying two days since their first successful test of the TBT drive. Assuming that ‘success’ was the right word for something that might have blown a hole in Mars you could park a decent sized asteroid in without it touching the sides.

They were worried enough about whether it was directly connected to the drive test that no one was ready to allow the Pathfinder to come back the same way. The pilot was going to have to make her way home using the conventional systems, which would take more than a week, which was only possible due to the AG drive in the first place. If they’d been doing this twenty years ago it would have taken months at a minimum. Luckily the ship was equipped for that sort of thing, as they’d planned for possible drive failure, so it was only tedious rather than life threatening.

“If it wasn’t the TBT drive it was one hell of a coincidence,” Captain Jackson, one of the military technical people also present, said. “The blast happened as far as we can tell at the precise moment the ship arrived over that point on the surface. It started somewhere underground which gave it a small delay until it was visible, but Phobos Station had the entire hemisphere under camera observation to record the arrival of the ship. They correlated the visible signs of the explosion with the Pathfinder arriving and seismic readings from the ground, and they all line up to within milliseconds.”

“What actually was it?” Amanda asked, staring at the recording that was replaying in the holo over the table. One side was a view from their experimental ship’s cameras, while the other was from Phobos Station. The bizarrely pretty blue fireball didn’t match anything she’d ever seen before. Neither did the recordings of a huge surge of gravitational interference, which every gravity detector in the solar system had measured. Even some sensitive seismometers on the Moon had noticed it as the waves went through that body and made it very gently ring like a giant bell.

“We have absolutely no idea, Doctor Jeffries,” he said with a shake of his head. “There was no radiation release, no neutron output, none of the signs of a fission or fusion blast. A vast amount of thermal radiation which has melted thousands of square kilometers of rock into glass, a hell of an electrical discharge that blew out half the instruments at the research station on the other side of the planet, and the gravity surge, but none of those match anything I’ve ever heard of. Not even in theory, and not even something as esoteric as antimatter. We just don’t know.”

“What was the yield?” Colonel Park asked.

“We’re estimating from the size of the crater a minimum energy release in the area of two hundred teratons, sir.”

Everyone gaped at him.

“Roughly the result of a ten kilometer iron asteroid hitting the planet dead on,” he added helpfully. “The crater is over forty kilometers across and nearly a kilometer deep. Based on measurements from the visual record, the fireball was over two hundred kilometers in diameter at maximum size.”

“Jesus Christ!” Philip said in awed tones. “What in god’s name did that?”

“I have no idea, but I most definitely do not want it happening here,” Colonel Parks replied grimly, provoking a nod from everyone else present. “That would kill half the people on the planet.” He looked at them all. “We need to find out what did it, why, and how. And most importantly how to make sure it does not happen again.”

“Maybe it was an asteroid that happened to hit at exactly that same moment?” Jen mused. “No, that doesn’t make sense, the results are completely ridiculous.”

“We’ll have to examine the ship when she gets back, to check the drive didn’t malfunction, but I can’t think of anything even in theory that could cause that,” John commented, pointing at the looping holo. He glanced around his team, all of them shaking their heads. “The exclusion principle should stop the drive interacting with anything other than the ship itself, which is inside the field. She could have aimed for the center of Mars in theory and still ended up in space.”

“Forgive me if I say I would rather not test that, Doctor,” Colonel Parks replied. He glanced at the holo too, then back to John. “Especially considering what actually happened.”

John had to agree. “Even so, I can’t see the drive field doing it,” he insisted. “When the bounceback is completed, we get almost all the energy we put into it back, and there’s only a small WIMP flux that’s not enough to even register on the instruments.” He shrugged. “We’re missing something important.”

“Indeed. And we need to work out what that is. Your drive works, but if that’s the result of using it, it’s of very limited use.” The colonel smiled a little. “We don’t have enough planets that we can afford to put enormous holes in them every time we want to go somewhere.”

“I wonder if it was a weapon?” Captain Jackson suggested almost absently, showing the signs of someone using an n-link very hard. “It certainly did enough damage that it could be used as such.”

“A weapon from whom?” Jen asked. “We certainly haven’t got anything that could do that. Neither does the CAS, or the European Alliance, or anyone else. And it’s too damn big to use on Earth anyway, except as a doomsday device straight out of a bad novel. Like the Colonel said, it would kill half the planet with one shot. You couldn’t even test it safely...”

He shrugged. “Just a thought. Maybe it was aliens?” His face showed he was joking, although he wasn’t precisely smiling.

“I doubt aliens decided to bomb Mars right at the same time we tested a superluminal drive, Captain,” his superior officer commented with a wry smile. “That seems to be stretching credulity far past the breaking point. But we need to work on this before we can risk another test. I very much hope the drive wasn’t the cause, since I would like to see it developed further.”

“We all would,” John said. He looked around at his group, then back to the military man. “We’d better go over the calculations again, and check all the results.”

“You’ll have all the resources you require, Doctor. Keep me updated on your progress.”

Colonel Parks stood, nodded to them, then left, Captain Jackson going with him after a quick wave to the rest.

“God.” Philip leaned back and sighed, staring at the holo. “So close, then this happens.”

“We’ll figure it out, Phil,” John assured him. “The theory works. We proved that. All we need to do is work out how to get rid of the collateral damage.”

They all looked at him, then at the holo, before everyone got to work.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

October 2077, Toronto
Institute of Advanced Physics
Department of Superluminal Drive Technology

“That’s what did it,” John finally said. He gestured wearily at the containment vessel in which a tiny glowing speck of something floated in an AG field. “There must have been a couple of hundred kilos of that stuff under the surface, around five hundred meters down based on the latest calculations.”

“What is it?” Colonel Parks asked with great interest, peering into the container through the transparent side. Around them, a dozen scientists were working hard, the AI Dmitry helping correlate their activities, while also monitoring ongoing experiments. The department had grown enormously since the early days, now occupying a large building of its own a dozen kilometers from where they’d first found the initial signs of what turned into TBT theory.

“We don’t have a full understanding of it yet, and even less idea of where it comes from, but it’s pretty much a type of dark matter that’s been bound into a form that interacts with normal matter,” John explained, looking between Parks and the other military people that had come with him. Seeing some confused expressions, he expanded on his comment. “Dark matter, and dark energy, don’t interact with normal matter and energy except through gravity. They account for the vast bulk of mass in the universe but we could only infer their existence through theory until about 2032, although it had been thought for decades before that to be the most likely explanation for a number of phenomenon astronomers had detected.”

He paused while everyone thought that through, then continued when the Colonel gestured a little. “The breakthrough that led to the development of the TBT drive was a chance discovery we made while researching dark matter through the mediation of WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which had been suspected to exist for a long time. The proof of Supersymmetry and the development of the Grand Unified Theory finally led to being able to detect them, and to techniques to generate and manipulate them. That in turn led to the AG drive, the inertial compensation field, and a number of other key technologies that all rely on altering or generating gravity. Even our modern fusion reactors wouldn’t be possible without that breakthrough.”

John noticed Amanda walk over and stand behind them, listening to his explanation with a slight smile, but went on with his impromptu lecture. “This material was found scattered in tiny, almost microscopic, amounts over half the surface of Mars after the Pathfinder Detonation Event. It defied normal chemical analysis, and all other standard techniques, giving completely ridiculous results such as having impossible physical properties, and so on. But we finally worked out that it’s something analogous to a clathrate, only consisting of dark matter bound into a matrix with normal matter to the point that it will interact with the rest of the universe.”

“What’s a clathrate?” one of the visitors asked.

“It’s a chemical compound formed of one substance that makes something like a three dimensional lattice which traps another one that wouldn’t normally bond with it,” Amanda replied from behind the small group and making them all turn to look at her. “The most common form of such a thing is a clathrate hydrate, such as what’s commonly known as methane ice. It forms at low temperatures under high pressure in the presence of methane, such as under the ocean in very cold water. It used to be mined for the gas until fusion was perfected.”

She waved at the container and its floating speck. “That material is in some ways similar, but it’s dark matter trapped in a lattice of modified normal matter, we suspect as the result of a very high energy event such as a supernova or something of that magnitude which occurred in a stellar zone rich in both dark matter and dark energy. Basically it’s a dark matter crystal, if you want to think of it like that.”

“And we’re almost certain that what happened is that the decaying WIMP field from the TBT drive operation interacted with a cache of this stuff buried on Mars and destabilized it all at once. It reverted to its original form more or less instantly, while releasing a vast amount of heat and high energy beta radiation. The gravitational effects were caused by the enormous WIMP flux it produced and at the center of the blast probably momentarily formed an actual singularity, incredibly enough,” John carried on, making them all look back to him again. “The energy yield is off the charts terrifying, even higher than a matter-antimatter explosion. There’s some thought that it’s essentially what could have happened during the first few microseconds of the Big Bang, only thankfully on an inconceivably smaller scale. Or we wouldn’t be here.”

He examined the floating little object, which was barely visible to the naked eye and only then because it was slightly glowing. “Only a small amount survived, probably because the effect was momentary and once the field decayed the remaining crystal wasn’t directly affected and only got scattered by the blast. We’ve managed to work out the possible energy yield from destabilizing microgram amounts and from that worked back from the measured blast size to arrive at a figure for the original amount. As I said it’s roughly two hundred kilograms, although there is an error of plus or minus about fifteen percent since we’re not sure it scales linearly.”

He fell silent as they all exchanged glances, then examined the container again. Eventually Colonel Parks said, “You are absolutely certain that the TBT drive interacted with this… material… and that’s what caused the detonation?”

“We are, yes,” John nodded. “As I said, we have a working theory that the AIs agree with, and very cautious experiments back it up.”

“And there is no possibility of the drive causing similar effects if this material is not present?”

“No. The WIMP field doesn’t interact with normal matter beyond gravitational effects, and those are so minor that it’s basically barely detectable in the first place.” John shook his head. “We were both spectacularly lucky and equally spectacularly unlucky to have the Pathfinder arrive close enough to the location of this stuff to set it off. If it had been a thousand kilometers further away it wouldn’t have had any effect, and we might never have discovered this effect. Which could have ended very badly if anyone happened to be there when we did manage to make it go bang.”

“Or if a ship arrived near a larger amount,” Jen commented from the other side of the room, turning away from some tests she was working on. They all looked over at her. She shrugged. “It has to exist somewhere else, right? There’s no way we just happened to trip over the only chunk of it in the universe. It might be all over the place. Even here on Earth for all we know.”

“That… does not make me feel safer,” John said slowly.

“It probably doesn’t, mind,” she added a moment later with a slight smile. “Or we’d most likely have noticed by now. The way it interacts with electricity would make it obvious, since one lightning strike in the wrong place and all sorts of weird things would happen. Not to mention that we’re pretty sure it’s toxic, although we haven’t got enough of it to test properly yet.”

Colonel Parks looked enquiringly at John, who nodded. “It seems very likely that it will interact badly with biological systems, we’re told. We know it reacts to an electrical charge with some extremely odd effects we’re still characterizing at the moment, which could take several years, but that does imply that electrical flow in the body could do much the same thing. The end results wouldn’t be pretty, even if it’s not chemically active.”

“Sounds like something of a nightmare substance,” one of the other visitors said. “Is it going to cause problems for the Mars program?”

“Hopefully not,” John replied, although he shrugged. “We’ve got people working on improving methods to detect and contain the stuff. Since we know it interacts with a WIMP field, there is some thought to it being possible to use a very low power one to scan for it by measuring changes in the energy flux. In theory that would let us detect it over significant distances. Possibly interplanetary ones, due to the way dark energy works. But that will take time and money to develop. With any luck by the time we need to put people anywhere near the site of the blast we’ll have been able to clean it up, and until then it’s far enough away that we can simply avoid it.”

“Does it have any useful properties?” Another man asked the question, looking intrigued. “Many materials are toxic or dangerous and still very valuable.”

“Some of the effects we’ve seen are interesting, but most of them we can already manage through much safer and more controllable methods,” Amanda noted, walking around to stand next to John. “Even the less likely ones are in theory achievable, with time and research. This substance is in our opinion far too dangerous and unstable to use commercially, if only due to the catastrophic interaction with WIMP fields. If the TBT drive becomes viable, which is after all what we’ve dedicated nearly twenty years to, we can’t risk using it in any way.”

“Even if we can find a method to shield the drive, it’s too hazardous,” John added. “Considering that you could probably make this damn stuff destabilize from the other side of the solar system with a sufficiently strong WIMP beam. About the only thing I could see it being used for is weapons, worryingly enough. It makes a fusion bomb look like a firecracker. You’d have to be an idiot to put the stuff into use otherwise.”

Colonel Parks gave him a thoughtful look, then turned his head to study the containment vessel again. After a while he turned back, although John got the feeling that he might have inadvertently done something stupid…

“I would tend to agree,” the man said mildly. “Is shielding the drive from this sort of problem even possible?”

“We think so, but it’s another entire branch of research that we’re certainly not going to solve overnight,” Amanda sighed. “We’ve got an entire department working on it. As Jen said, we have to assume there is more of the material around the place, and we don’t want to risk this happening again somewhere where the results would be less fortunate. We’re going to have to make sure we keep our testing of the drive to empty areas of space once we restart the program, until and unless we can work out how to either detect the substance from far enough away to avoid it, or shield the drive, or both.”

“Agreed.” Colonel Parks nodded. He glanced at the people with him, then turned back to them. “I will take this to the relevant people, and I expect the program will be restarted in short order. I also believe that more funding will be put your way to allow a rapid research effort into this problem.”

“That would definitely help,” John said.

“We’ll be in touch, Doctors,” Parks went on. “Until then.” Having shaken their hands, the entire party left. Sitting down in the nearest chair John rested his chin on his hands and stared at the mystery substance in the containment vessel.

“We need to give it a name,” Amanda remarked, leaning on the bench next to him and also looking at it.

“I vote for Tiberium!” Jen called.

“We are not naming the most bizarre material ever discovered after something from an ancient video game, Jen,” Amanda replied calmly, causing the other woman to laugh.

“Marsite?” John suggested with a grin.

“Sounds like a breakfast spread.”

“Bangium?”

“That’s just silly.”

They exchanged smiles, then got back to work.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

March 2083
South Polar Region
Nine hundred and twenty kilometers from the Pathfinder Blast Event site.

#More Planium readings detected fifteen kilometers due west of our current location, Mike.#

“Trace amounts as usual, or something larger this time, Demi?” Mike asked wearily, leaning back in the seat of his vehicle and stretching. Even with all the comforts of home, this was a tedious job.

#Based on the readings I estimate as much as fifty grams,# his AI replied quietly. Her voice, since he’d decided that she was female and she’d gone along with it, was pleasant and low, sounding through his n-link a lot like a teacher he’d known as a child. Once again he marveled at how rapidly AI technology was developing. When he’d left Earth fifteen years ago for the slowly expanding Martian Research Outpost, they’d been idiot savants, yet today they were as smart as humans were at a minimum. And generally easier to deal with in his experience.

“Fifty grams!?” he exclaimed in shock, sitting upright very quickly. “Are you sure?”

#Within a very small margin of error, yes,# she replied. He could almost swear her voice showed amusement at his reaction, no matter what he was told about AIs not having much if anything in the way of emotions.

“That’s a hundred times as large as anything we’ve ever found before,” he said in wonder.

#The latest detectors are far more sensitive and work through much deeper layers of rock,# the AI replied. #The readings suggest the source is buried at a depth of approximately two hundred meters. The location correlates with a small range of hills, and it’s possible it’s in a cave under them. Satellite survey results have shown many such caves in that area.#

His vehicle was already heading in that direction, Mike having activated it without much thought. The idea of finding fifty grams of the incredibly rare and weird Planium, so named after the Promethei Planum area in which a much larger quantity had drastically remodeled the landscape eight years previously, was exciting. There was quite a reward for each gram of the substance, both for its value for research and for the purposes of decontaminating what would one day be another habitable planet. No one wanted that stuff lying around where it could cause future problems.

They arrived in the general area within minutes, the AG vehicle easily floating over any obstructions. More readings were taken as they quartered the area, until finally he was looking out at a hole in the side of a cliff with a quizzical expression.

“Demi? Is it my imagination, or is that cave… a little too perfectly rectangular?”

#I have to admit it does not appear to be natural,# the AI replied after a moment. The pair of them scanned the entrance, which was a very obviously manufactured opening, the sides perfectly straight and flat. #It’s large enough to drive into.#

“Well, only one way to find out, I guess,” he said as he brought the drive online again and started moving.

#We could send a drone inside first,# his synthetic companion commented mildly.

“Where’s the fun in that?” he chuckled, carefully maneuvering the aircar into the hole, which it fitted fairly easily. Half a kilometer and four turns later in what was clearly an artificial structure, he stopped the vehicle dead and simply stared.

There was a very long pause, then he said in a slightly strangled voice, “Demi?”

#Yes, Mike?#

“Do you think there’s a reward for finding proof of alien life?”

The AI made a small sound that was perilously close to a snicker. #I suspect that you won’t have any difficulty getting funding for your projects after this,# she replied, as they both looked at the metal door incised with strange symbols, around which tiny lights flickered.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

June 2084
Institute of Advanced Physics
Department of Superluminal Drive Technology

“The latest results from the Mars Research group have shown that this facility was a small automated outpost acting as a backup for the main one, which was in the exact center of the blast site,” Doctor Henry Chan, Xenoanthropologist, remarked as he highlighted several locations on the holo display with a series of mental commands. “The larger site was, based on the data we’ve so far downloaded and decoded, some forty times larger than the one discovered last year. We have only fragmentary data about them, or what they were doing on Mars, or indeed what happened to them, since the records have been badly degraded by both sheer time and the damage caused by the Event. It’s likely that we’ll never be able to reconstruct more than a small amount of the data, which is a great blow to science.”

“Do we know how old that place is yet?” John asked.

“Based on a number of dating methods, we’re estimating approximately fifty thousand years plus or minus fifteen hundred,” Doctor Chan said, popping up several tables of data. “It would appear to have been uninhabited for nearly that length of time. There are no bodies, and very little data on the people who built it. We don’t even have any pictures of them.”

He flipped through a number of pages of information, until he stopped on one indecipherable set of symbols. “Their computer technology was robust to have lasted this long with any sort of integrity, but not very advanced by our standards. There is no sign of spintronics, for example. Without the aid of our AIs we’d have spent decades attempting to work out the little we have so far. However, we did make one rather unnerving discovery. As best we can determine, this document is a warning.”

“Warning?” Colonel Parks asked intently. “To whom? Or about what?”

“To us, we think,” Doctor Chan replied. “Or, more accurately, to anyone who discovered the remnants of that base.”

“What is it warning about?”

“Some great threat the aliens were very worried about,” he said. “We’re not sure yet what that was. Disease, natural disaster, enemies… It could have been any number of things. My personal view is it was some opponent of theirs based on some of the phrasing used, assuming we’ve managed to translate that part correctly. But they seem to have been running from whatever it was, which may explain why their facilities seem to have been abandoned with considerable haste.”

Everyone looked at each other, then back at the holo. “That is somewhat discomfiting,” Amanda said after a few seconds. “It makes me wonder if that threat is still around.”

“We have wondered the same thing,” Doctor Chan admitted with a frown. “Fifty thousand years is a lot to us, but it might not be to whatever the Promethians were.”

“Promethians?” Philip asked, sounding puzzled. The other man smiled a little.

“That’s what they’re being called, due to their outpost being located in the Promethei Planum area of Mars. For want of a better name, that one seems to have stuck.”

“I suppose it’s as good a name as any,” Philip chuckled. After a moment he became more serious. “But you’re right, it’s not impossible that this mysterious threat could still be out there, or they could as well.”

“A thought has occurred to me that I find disturbing but can’t rule out entirely,” Colonel Parks remarked, his eyes fixed on the holo. Everyone looked at him. “Is it possible that the large amount of Planium that was in their main base was actually a booby-trap intended to deal with these potential enemies of theirs, assuming Doctor Chan is right about that possibility?” He looked away from the display to cast his eyes around the conference table to each of them in turn. “It caused a vast amount of damage and utterly obliterated the entire facility. If they were expecting an invasion or attack, it would have been a good last ditch defense. If nothing else it would ensure that no trace of them was left.”

“But it didn’t go off until we accidentally triggered it...” John pointed out.

The colonel sighed. “I know. That part puzzles me. Perhaps they abandoned their base before they got attacked, or the attackers somehow neutralized the trap, or there was an error in the design… There are a lot of possibilities and no answers. But I can’t rule it out. As you’ve all said at one point or another, Planium is hideously dangerous in large quantities. I can’t see any good alternative reason for it to be there except for some form of weapon.”

They exchanged looks again. “The man has a point,” Philip commented.

“Power generation, maybe? We know it can be used for that, if you don’t mind the danger,” Amanda said tentatively.

“That much of it? How much power could they need?” John responded. “Grams would be enough for most purposes. Kilograms is getting ridiculous.”

They discussed the concept for some time, but were ultimately unable to come to any consensus. “We may never know,” Doctor Chan finally summed up. “But we’ve learned quite a lot, even it it isn’t as much as we’d like. And we now know for a fact that we’re not alone in the universe, which is one of the most important discoveries in history.”

Everyone nodded. Then they went back to work, while thinking over the possibility that one day they might themselves meet another species out there somewhere.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

November 2087
Institute of Advanced Physics
Department of Superluminal Drive Technology

“It works. It bloody works!” John grabbed Amanda and danced around the desk with her in his arms.

“Yes, it works. Let go, you lumbering idiot,” she said acerbically. He released her and grinned.

“No sense of fun, some people,” he complained. “Thirty years we’ve been working together, and you still won’t dance with me.”

“You have at least two left feet and outweigh me two to one, you twit,” she sighed. He merely shrugged.

“But it works. The shielding actually works.”

Her frown turned into a broad smile. “That it does. Finally. We can retrofit the Pathfinder with it within two months, then see how well it works in practice. If it does what these tests show, we could be in a position to try the first interstellar test that doesn’t end up in empty space.”

“Those poor test pilots are getting bored with looking at emptiness,” John agreed. “I think they want to see another planet. I know I would in their position.”

“Let’s call the relevant people and tell them the good news, then,” she smiled.

Both of them looked around as the door opened to reveal Jen, who had a weird expression on her face. “The shield works, Jen!” John shouted in glee.

“Great,” she mumbled, apparently thinking about something else. Looking at the main holo display she activated it with her n-link and projected an image onto it even as she walked into the room and closed the door. Both the others turned to look at it, slightly confused.

“What’s this?” Amanda asked.

“The results of the prototype Deep WIMP Array,” their colleague and friend replied. “We got all the detectors synced up last night for the first time, and ran a quick test to calibrate the system. This is the result.”

They glanced at each other, then her, then went back to looking at the image.

“That’s Mars,” she continued, highlighting a shadowy sphere with thousands of tiny bright points scattered all over about one quarter of it. “Planium particles all over the damn place.”

“You’re picking up that much from Earth orbit?” John asked in astonishment. “Christ. That’s far more sensitive than I expected.”

“It works incredibly well,” she nodded. “So far there are no other signs of it within range. With one exception.”

The display changed, then zoomed in. A fuzzy dim blob appeared close to an even fuzzier one that was considerably larger. Near the middle of the first one was a bright spot.

“What… is that?” John asked slowly, leaning closer to examine the display.

“About sixty thousand tons of Planium,” Jen said in a low, worried voice. “Enough to destroy half the solar system. And there’s no way it’s a natural deposit, it’s way too concentrated for that.”

There was silence for some time as all three of them looked at the holo.

“A weapon?”

“I can’t see it being anything else,” Jen replied to Amanda’s horrified expression. “What else would you need that much Planium for?”

“Fuck.” John shook his head. “I’ve got a very bad feeling about this. I think we need to tell someone a little higher up the food chain right now.”

As he placed an n-link call to Colonel Parks, he tried not to think what would have happened if their first test flight had gone to Charon rather than Mars...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Temporal Bounceback Transportation Drive System, commonly known as the 'Blink Drive'

The principles behind the Jeffries-Warden TBT Drive were initially discovered almost accidentally in 2058 by Doctor Amanda Jeffries and Doctor John Warden during research into Supersymmetry and Dark Matter. It was found that under the correct conditions, a form of momentary temporal translocation could be induced in macroscopic objects. The translocation field decayed in microseconds, but while it lasted it projected the object back in time approximately 98% of the age of the universe. Due to a principle dubbed 'Conservation of Temporal Momentum' it is not possible to move an object back along the temporal axis and leave it there. It will always return to the present time plus a very small offset of some dozens of microseconds, and does not interact with anything in the process.

So what use is this effect, one naturally asks?

That is the key question, and the answer is of course that due to cosmological expansion, the universe at 2% or less of its current age was inconceivably smaller than it is at the current time. There is a very brief window between the 'outbound' leg of the trip and the 'inbound' leg where the object can be moved a small distance in the far past, but on its return to the present will find the distance it has covered is hugely greater. Effectively near instantaneous superluminal travel has been achieved even though at no point during the entire process has the speed of light genuinely been exceeded.

The Blink drive opened up the universe to humanity...

From 'A Guide to Superluminal Travel Techniques, second edition, Ganymede Technical Publishing PLC, 2143'

 

[mp3.1415player]

June 2088, Ottawa
International Governmental Cooperation Committee Building
Threat Identification Group

“The balance of opinion is still that the Charon Planium Mass is most likely a weapon of truly devastating power,” General Gauthier LeBatelier, Chief of the Defense Staff and the highest ranking Canadian Combined Forces officer, said as he gestured at the huge holo floating in the middle of the enormous room. Nearly two hundred people were sitting in three concentric rings around the center depressed area, all of them intently studying the image and listening without a word.

This was the modern version of what had once been the UN Security Council before the destruction of New York in 2034, along with nine other conurbations in the former USA and nearly a dozen more world wide during the madness of the Quick War. Eleven minutes and nineteen seconds caused twenty-three countries, large and small, to cease to exist, created five new ones, and utterly changed the course of human history. And, of course, killed directly nearly half a billion people and indirectly twice that in the years since. Even fifty-four years later bodies were still being located and laid to rest. Many would never be found.

These people were the ones responsible for making sure such a thing never happened again and were extremely dedicated to that end.

“The latest high resolution scans from the Deep Array fix the mass at just over sixty-one thousand two hundred and twelve metric tons of planium. It’s in a compact mass very close to the center of Charon. Our people are convinced that there is also a large amount of refined metals surrounding it, due to interference on the scan, and are attempting to design an upgrade for the Array to allow it to directly detect materials other than planium itself in quantities smaller than a moon. Early indications are that while this is most likely possible, it may well take several years at a minimum to arrive at a prototype, so for now we can’t rely on it.”

He brought up a different graphic. “Further tests on the planium samples recovered from Mars after the Event have let us characterize its properties more exactly, and the more we learn about it the more worrying it becomes. The energy release from destabilization is truly enormous, far more than a matter-antimatter reaction which was once considered the highest possible due to Einstein’s equation for matter and energy equivalence.”

“Excuse me, General?” the representative from the Caribbean Aligned States politely cut in, the building AI projecting a holo indicator over his head to indicate who was speaking, and simultaneously translating his words into all the languages in use completely seamlessly through their n-links. General LeBatelier turned to him and waited. “How is that possible?”

“You would have to talk directly to the scientists for a full explanation, sir,” the general replied. “However as I understand it the excess energy comes from the dark matter bound into the planium. The interaction between the WIMP field and the planium somehow catalyzes a discharge of dark energy when the substance is forcibly destabilized. But that’s the limit of my understanding of that subject.”

“Thank you, General. My apologies for interrupting,” the man said with a nod, sitting back and resuming listening.

Turning back to the display with an acknowledging nod, LeBatelier resumed his presentation. “As I was saying, the energy release is almost unbelievably enormous. It works out to approximately three and a half exajoules per gram, or in other words somewhat more than eight hundred megatons TNT equivalent per gram of planium. The density of the material is about the same as that of aluminum so a gram is roughly a third of a cubic centimeter.”

He held up a coin. “About that much. To produce an explosion that is nearly fifteen times larger than the largest fusion bomb ever detonated. The weapon that destroyed New York was less than two hundred kilotons and it killed nearly a million people instantly.”

Looking around at the room, he changed the holo to show a map as he went on, “If a blast that size occurred in this room, everything between Perth to the southwest and Thurso to the northeast would be totally obliterated. The fireball would rise out of the atmosphere. Everyone from Quebec city to the other side of the Great Lakes would be at risk of thermal burns.” As he spoke a simulation ran, showing an immense blue fireball rising into the sky over the 3D map of eastern Canada. “That is from one gram of planium.”

Looking around again at the appalled faces of the TIG committee, he paused to let his words sink in.

After a while, which was completely silent, he changed the display to show the Pathfinder Event recording, something everyone in the room was very familiar with, as was pretty much everyone on the planet at this point. “The PDE was the result of approximately a hundred and ninety-four kilograms of planium detonated. If that happened here… Well, we’d lose the entire hemisphere for sure. Projections are that the end result would be the nuclear winter to end all nuclear winters, probably a new ice age, and the loss of upwards of ninety percent of all life on the planet, within fifty years.”

No one said a word, but they were listening very carefully indeed.

“The scientists tell me that the yield is almost constant, although it goes up by approximately two percent between microgram amounts and low gram quantities, then settles down to a linear progression. So it’s easy to extrapolate from what we’ve seen to what would happen if the Charon Mass was triggered. To a very rough approximation it’s more than fifty one million teratons.”

The silence in the room was deafening, as everyone present consulted their n-links for what that really meant and felt faint. He carried on regardless.

“Nearly one percent of the gravitational binding energy of our planet. Twelve hours worth of the entire output of the sun. It would utterly annihilate the Earth's biosphere if it detonated anywhere with several AU. And that’s just from the thermal and electrical energy release,” the general said in low but audible tones.

“The even more dangerous aspect are the gravitational waves it produces as it destabilizes. The PDE caused gravity ripples that were detectable by the probes around Saturn. The Charon Mass would, assuming the scientists are right again, cause so much gravitational disturbance that Charon itself would probably collapse into a singularity, which is a problem all on its own due to the astronomical amount of Hawking radiation that would be emitted in the process. They’re fairly certain that it would also trigger massive solar flares when the waves reached the sun, which would devastate the inner system, and quite possibly cause the orbits of even the outer planets to radically change.”

When he stopped talking everyone simply looked at him for nearly thirty seconds, until the Prime Minister of Canada cleared her throat. “So what you are telling us is that if it is a weapon it is one designed to destroy entire stellar systems, General?”

“That does appear to be the consensus among the scientific and military advisers, Ma’am,” he replied with a nod. “It’s not a star killer, but it’s more than enough to cause so much damage to a star system that it would render it uninhabitable for centuries. And most likely kill almost everyone in it even from that distance, unless they were shielded by the star. We believe that, assuming that the detection of a metallic structure around the planium mass is real, that this is probably some form of delivery system intended to transport it deeper into the system if it was activated, to cause the maximum amount of damage.” He changed the display back to the original one showing the ghostly image of Charon with the bright spot in the middle.

“It’s clearly in our opinion almost certainly a doomsday weapon, or terror weapon of some sort. You don’t need something even vaguely close to that size for any normal military purpose. The only reason to have a warhead that big is to kill an entire world, and there are very few reasons we can plausibly consider that would make that an option. That device is a species killer. We assume it to be the work of the threat the Promethians were worried about, and quite likely those behind this thing are what they were running from. And in all probability were destroyed by.”

“A planet killing missile hidden inside a dwarf planet on the edge of the solar system,” the Prime Minister muttered. “It sounds like something from a holonovel.”

“Unfortunately it is very real and very dangerous, ma’am,” he said with a sigh.

"If it is a weapon, General, whose is it? You say that the assumption is that it is the work of whoever the Promethians were running from, but considering that the technology is apparently the same as that of the Promethian base on Mars, isn't it possible it was actually made by them instead of aimed at them?"

LeBatelier looked over at the other side of the inner ring of seats to the woman who had spoken, the Minister of Science for the European Alliance.

"We considered that, of course. It can't be ruled out, I admit. We are fairly certain that they never came back, and our conclusion is that this is probably because they couldn't come back. Possibly due to being rendered extinct, or maybe just chased out far enough that they abandoned our system entirely and for good. But it is within the realms of possibility that they set up a trap for their attackers using Charon as a phenomenally large land mine equivalent that would be detonated if their attackers returned looking for them, then made sure to hide somewhere else. If that's the case, presumably the second alien force never did return, which is the only reason we're still here in the first place."

He shrugged. "We may well never know one way or the other. Most of our analysts consider the Charon Mass to be more likely to be the work of the attackers than the attacked, if only because of the enormous disparity between the sizes of the two planium deposits and the complexity of an operation to embed it at the center of Charon itself, then erase all traces of its presence. Without the Deep Array we'd most likely never have found it. It is very well disguised in an unlikely spot for anyone to simply stumble across it."

"The similarity in technology is easily explainable as a common technical base," she mused out loud. "After all, everyone on Earth knows how to make nuclear weapons and that knowledge spread in only a few years at most."

"Exactly." He nodded.

“Could it be something other than a weapon, in your opinion?”

“It’s certainly not impossible, Ma’am,” he replied after a moment’s thought. “And I would like to believe that. Unfortunately I find that difficult, as does everyone else who’s working on the problem. Planium is far too dangerous to use for almost any possible use we can come up with so far. Yes, it can be used as a very potent source of energy with minimal effort, but the potential for catastrophe is so high no one thinks any sensible intelligence would ever risk it. It has some interesting properties that could make a variant of antigravity very simple to arrange, but WIMP technology allows us to do the same thing without too much effort and far more controllably, to say nothing of being vastly safer. Our AG systems, if they fail, don’t destroy entire countries.”

“I understand the researchers have discovered it can be used to reduce effective mass, or indeed increase it,” she said after thinking over his words. He nodded. “Surely that has important applications?”

“Undoubtedly, but again that can be achieved through much safer methods, I’m assured by our research experts. The studies of microgram amounts of planium are quite rapidly synergizing with existing WIMP theory to allow us to duplicate essentially any property it has, without risking the lives of millions of people. And no one can see, even if you were going to use planium for that mass altering effect for some reason, what you would need over sixty-one kilotons of the stuff for. It’s a quantity so appallingly and insanely large that an enormously powerful weapon is still by far the most likely and plausible scenario, as worrying as that is.”

"And what about the chance that our mysterious aliens may have known about the uses of planium but not had WIMP technology, so never realized how dangerous it really is?"

He sighed a little. "We have discussed that as well. Yes, it's possible, but a lot of it hinges on whether planium occurs naturally or not. And if it does, how common it is, how much or little is found in any one place, and a host of other parameters. If it's like uranium ore, for example, it would take a significant effort to refine it to the point it could be utilized, at great cost and risk due to the toxicity, but it could be done by a fairly primitive technological civilization who were sufficiently determined. We managed to build atomic weapons in an era of vacuum tubes and piston engines, after all. But we're fairly confident that the study of it would inevitably sooner or later lead to the discovery of WIMP theory, as the study of radioactivity led to theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics. The big problem with that of course is if it did, there's a better than decent chance that the first thing they'd manage to do is destroy themselves when they tested some form of WIMP flux generator and it interacted badly with any planium they had in range."

"Which clearly neither of these alien species did or they wouldn't have visited us," she said with an understanding look.

"Precisely. If they'd chanced across planium and its uses, we can't see how they wouldn't have studied it properly. Which would end in disaster unless they got incredibly lucky." He looked around at the others for a moment then focused back on her. "At the other end of the scale, if they came up with a working WIMP theory and the technology it leads to like we did, they could have discovered the danger without destroying themselves, possibly by triggering a naturally occurring formation of planium. If it does form naturally. And if it doesn't, it's in theory possible to make it. Opinion is divided on how likely it is that it's something that is a natural material or a synthetic one. We won't know until and unless we happen to find some lying around out there. All we currently know is that the only two sources of it in the solar system were brought here by outsiders, and could well have been used in warfare, which does somewhat point to the second possibility rather than the first."

She nodded thoughtfully when he finished.

“Thank you, General. I will admit I was doubtful to begin with, but I can’t deny that you put a compelling case before us.”

“I would very much like to be mistaken,” he responded with a shake of his head. “We all would. The implications of a planium bomb big enough to kill the entire solar system orbiting around Pluto for who knows how long is terrifying. But in my opinion we have to proceed on the basis that the most likely application for the device is exactly what we suspect it is. Even if it is not actually a weapon, it's still phenomenally dangerous and we need to deal with it one way or another. The risk to everything is far too high to allow it to remain where it is."

“So in the end it can be summed up as a peaceful use is possible but unlikely, while a military use is all too plausible,” the Prime Minister commented sadly.

“Quite. For weapons you actively want dangerous and unstable materials,” he nodded. “It’s stable enough to be handled in large quantities provided you are correctly shielded from the toxic effects, but sufficiently simple to detonate that it’s easy to use in a warhead. We already have several teams who have sketched out designs for such weapons, should we ever need them. It’s almost too simple for my peace of mind, in fact. Much simpler than successfully producing a fusion warhead and with no accompanying radiation.”

Once again, there was silence, before several people began talking at once.

#Order, please!# Athena, the IGCC AI said in their heads in clear tones. #Please settle down and allow the general to continue his presentation. Questions can be asked one at a time.#

“Thank you, Athena,” the Prime Minister said. “Calm down, people.” She glared at the South American League’s Premier, who was standing and had his hand outstretched. “Sit down, Carlos.”

The man looked mildly embarrassed, glancing at his neighbors, then in the face of her expression subsided into his seat. “Carry on, General. I must admit I share the disquiet at hearing about weapons research using planium. We all remember what happened in thirty-four and the idea that such a thing could recur with weapons even more devastating than fusion bombs is not a comforting one...”

“As you say, Ma’am, no one wants a repeat of the Mad Years,” he replied when she fell silent. “The entire point of my job, and that of everyone present, is to make sure that never happens. But the issue is that there is, or at least was, someone or something out there that appears to have mined our outermost planet and almost certainly killed an entire species of aliens. We have to assume that they still may be out there, or someone else with a similar goal. Researching methods to defend ourselves is entirely sensible and falls within the authority given to me and my people.”

“Are you seriously saying that you’re worried we might get attacked by extraterrestrials?” the EA science minister asked slightly incredulously.

“I’m not dismissing it as a possibility,” he replied, turning to her. “We know for a fact that at least one other intelligent species existed, only fifty thousand years ago at most. As I said there is strong evidence to the effect that another species attacked them, and quite possibly killed them off, since they don’t seem to have come back since abandoning their bases on Mars. There are a hundred and fifty billion stars in our galaxy alone at a minimum and the chances that only two or three of them produced intelligent life seems minuscule, not to mention the fact that there are billions upon billions of other galaxies in the universe. We know we’re not alone, and we know that at least some of our neighbors were both aggressive and highly dangerous.”

Casting his gaze around the room as he dismissed the floating holo, he resumed talking after a short pause in which no one appeared to dare replying. “The TBT drive allows transport to the other side of the galaxy as easily as from Earth to Mars. We could get visitors from almost literally anywhere. Even from Andromeda, if it comes to that. Sure, we’re one star out of billions and the odds are very low of someone accidentally stumbling over us, but on the other hand we also have irrefutable proof that it’s happened at least twice in only fifty thousand years. That does somewhat imply that it could be a regular event.”

Waving a hand at the ceiling and implying the universe, he added, “Hell, for all we know there’s an entire galactic civilization out there with thousand of species running around all over the place, just like out of an SF book. If someone comes here looking for their ancient superweapon, or just to say hello, I would be remiss in my duties not to have at least considered the possibility they’d turn out to be hostile and to take preventative steps.”

“As much as I’d like to deny it, you make a worrying amount of sense,” the EA woman finally responded.

“I don’t like it either, Ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t end up in this position because I want to kill people, even aliens. But my job is to consider the unthinkable and prepare for the worst, even while hoping for the best.”

“Well said, General,” the Canadian PM nodded. “I think we can all agree on that. I also think that we can all agree that we need to make sure that no planium is allowed to fall into the hands of people irresponsible enough to do something unfortunate with it.”

“I can see no good reason to allow it on the planet at all,” the SAL premier remarked, with a look around. Quite a few people nodded in agreement. “Even tiny amounts could kill millions. We need to regulate the material as carefully as we control fissionables and biotoxins. There is essentially no peaceful use for it, it doesn’t occur naturally in the entire solar system as far as the scan data shows, so we should arrange to make sure that it is all collected from Mars and stored safely somewhere a great distance from inhabited areas.”

“There have been plans for some years to establish a research outpost on Ceres,” someone else pointed out. “With the TBT drive, accessing almost anywhere in the solar system becomes a trivial matter. Perhaps we should press ahead with those plans, suitably modified to allow research into planium far enough away from places we value to make sure an accident doesn’t cause too much damage.”

“The WIMP flux shielding technology is proving successful,” General LeBatelier noted. “Although it still needs refinement before anyone would want to risk transporting planium inside a TBT ship. The scientists are sure it’s no longer a risk for detonating it at range, though.”

“That’s simple enough, we just transport the stuff with normal non-superluminal craft from Mars,” the EA minister said. “The latest ships can do that in under two weeks worst case. Once the planium is safely stored, personnel and equipment can be transported via TBT drive. We could have a base up and running in less than five years.”

There was general agreement on that idea. After discussing it for a while longer, Athena called for a vote, and the resolution was unanimously passed.

“The Martian planium is one thing, but what do we do about Charon?” the CAS representative queried when they’d returned from a short recess. “Clearly we cannot allow it to loom over us like the Sword of Damocles indefinitely. The risk of accidentally detonating it is tiny but not zero, even if we assume the original builders never return.”

“We are still working on that, sir,” LeBatelier sighed. “And believe me, I’ve lost a lot of sleep over it in the last year. So far we don’t have a good solution, but we’ll find one eventually. Until then, we can only keep our distance to minimize risk and keep working.”

Not one of them was happy about that, but no one could come up with an alternative, not even Athena when asked. So in the end they tabled that for another day and went on with the rest of their work, uncomfortably aware of the distant yet far too close threat that had probably been there for most of human history.

Not that this made it any easier to consider...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

October 2095
Ceres Secure Research Facility
Designated TBT Minimum Range Perimeter

#Ceres flight control has cleared us for approach, Alex,# the voice of her ship whispered in her mind.

Captain Williams, former test pilot on the Pathfinder program and the first human to travel faster than light, nodded. “Thanks, Hermes.” She turned around and looked at the people in the rear of the fast courier she was in charge of. It wasn’t as glamorous as testing the very first superluminal ship, but it was an excellent posting and she loved it. She could and did go anywhere in the system, and at times as far as the Oort cloud, where a number of observation bases were being established. The only place absolutely forbidden to any blink drive ship was the zone ten AU in radius centered on Pluto, which was enforced rigorously by AIs and military forces. Not that anyone was stupid enough to even risk it.

Humans were many things, but globally suicidal wasn’t one of them. They’d learned their lesson at last. And their AI companions made sure they didn’t forget why.

The new Ceres research center had a much, much smaller forbidden zone, but it was still seriously maintained. While it was very unlikely verging on impossible for a shielded blink drive to destabilize planium even at point blank range these days, no one wanted to be the first to test it, so they made sure they always shut the drive down a million kilometers away out of an abundance of caution. In time that would probably be found to be unnecessary but right now both she and Hermes completely agreed with it.

‘I can’t believe how fast life has changed,’ she thought as she examined her passengers. Two of them were famous, since they were the pair that had made the initial discovery that had led to this point, over three and a half decades ago. Both Doctor Warden and Doctor Jeffries were well past seventy now but these days that was at worst early middle age, what with the way medical technology was improving now AIs were helping out. As in almost every field, their synthetic friends were rapidly changing things at a rate that was almost dizzying.

The future had arrived very suddenly, and humanity was still getting to grips with it. Enjoying the hell out of it for the most part, but with a slightly puzzled look at the same time…

“It’ll take about thirty minutes from here before we can dock,” she said after that moment of introspection, even as at the back of her mind she kept track of the ship accelerating on AG and fusion drive. Inside the vessel nothing could be felt other than a subliminal vibration conducted through the structure. It was a far cry from her very first trip into space twenty five years ago.

Doctor Warden smiled. “I still find it amusing that we can, in theory, go anywhere within hundreds of thousands of light years in microseconds, but we end up riding a rocket for the last part of the trip,” he remarked with good natured approval.

Doctor Jeffries laughed. “One way or another we’re likely to always find the first and last few kilometers take almost all the time,” she replied to him, as the other four people in the ship listened. “We can’t jump into atmosphere, for a start, so we need to use AG drives for that part.”

“I have a few ideas about that,” Doctor Warden said mysteriously. “But that can wait.”

“Do you really think your people have worked out a solution to the Charon Weapon?” Alex asked after a second or two. It was something she’d wondered about ever since she’d first heard the rumors from friends in the scientific arm of the RCSF a couple of months ago.

“We have a number of plausible concepts to work out the final details on,” Jeffries replied, turning to look at her. Doctor Warden relaxed and let her speak, while his other three companions, all scientists from various IAP research departments, listened as well. Two of them were women, one in her twenties and one about ten years older, and the man was about forty.

“How can you deal with that much planium?” Alex knew very well how elaborate the precautions on the Ceres base were and it only had under eighty grams of the ghastly substance, the end result of decontaminating Mars as well as could be arranged. Even with the latest scanning technology it had been a vast effort that was still ongoing. Suggestions from exasperated technicians that they simply fly an unshielded drive close enough to set the remaining planium off had been firmly rejected as far too destructive, so they had no choice but to do it the hard way. Hundreds of people and AI command remote drones had been crisscrossing the red planet for years. “We can’t possibly risk destabilizing it.”

“No, we can’t,” Jeffries agreed. “And we can’t reasonably cut open Charon to get at it and possibly break it up into smaller pieces to deal with it that way. Everyone suspects it’s most likely booby trapped as a security measure, since that would be the logical thing to do. So we’re going to move it.”

“Move… it?” This puzzled Alex. If they couldn’t get at it, how could they…

#I believe Doctor Jeffries is referring to moving Charon, not the warhead,# Hermes, who was a constant presence in her mind through her n-link, said with a note of amusement. Alex gaped as Jeffries nodded, smiling a little.

“You’re going to move a moon twelve hundred kilometers in diameter,” she said flatly.

“Yes.”

“How?!”

“There are several ways that were discussed,” Doctor Jeffries replied. “One was to install some very large AG systems on it along with a series of massive fusion torches, using the moon itself for fuel. It would then need the drives fired in a sequence synchronized to Charon’s orbit of Pluto to gradually raise it, like they used to do with satellites and probes. Pluto’s gravity would help with that. It’s slow but it would work.”

“The problem is that we’re none to certain that a sufficiently strong AG field to allow something as large as Charon to be moved in a reasonable time wouldn’t interact with the planium, since we’re not sure if it gets more sensitive as the amount increases,” Doctor Warden put in. “In theory we can shield that, but the risk is far too high if we’re wrong.”

Alex was staring at them, still stunned by the idea of just moving an entire moon out of the system. It seemed ridiculous.

On the other hand she was in a spacecraft heading towards Ceres at enormous speed while being piloted by an AI that was linked to her brain, so ridiculous wasn’t quite as simple as it used to be…

“Someone suggested putting a very large TBT drive on it and just jumping it out of the galaxy,” Doctor Warden added with a grin, which made her mouth drop open. “Again, in theory a drive that big is fairly feasible. Bigger, even. On the other hand we’re back to it going off pop if we make a mistake, and we don’t know if it would do it before it left or afterwards. If we were certain it would be afterwards, it would be a good plan, but as it is it’s too dangerous.”

“The current plan is something of a wildcard, since we haven’t tried it before, but the calculations show it should be possible,” his colleague resumed when Alex managed to collect herself. Even Hermes seemed surprised by the last suggestion as far as she could tell from her link to him. “It’s more or less an inversion of the AG concept. We’ve never had reason to do it, but it’s eminently possible to use gravity generator to produce a very large positive gravity field rather than a gravity-nullifying one. It’s an extension of the inertial compensator in most respects, only vastly more powerful.”

“So… you make a giant gravity field, which gives you...” Alex thought it through, then suddenly got it. “Oh. That’s brilliant. You generate an enormous gravity field which makes an artificial gravity well. The entire moon moves towards it!”

“Essentially, yes,” Doctor Jeffries nodded. “We should, in theory, be able to generate a field large enough to warp the space near the moon in such a way that it ‘falls downhill’ into it. We pull it out of orbit, not push it. The beauty of that idea is that the WIMP flux of the gravity generator falls off much faster than the gravity gradient itself does. So we can ensure that even if the shielding doesn’t work as well as it should, it’s far enough away that it doesn’t matter.”

“And we then just move the generated field steadily away as Charon speeds up and we should be able to gently pull it out of the system.” Doctor Warden looked pleased. “It’ll take some time, although less than we first expected when we came up with the idea, but we can get it up to a respectable speed in a few months or so. When it’s safely clear of the Oort cloud we can send some probes down to study it if we want, although a number of people are pushing for simply deliberately detonating it to make sure it’s gone once and for all. I’m a little hesitant over that since we’ll lose any real data on the damn thing, but I can’t deny I’d feel better if it was no longer there.”

Alex nodded, understanding completely. Everyone who thought about the Charon Mass wanted it gone.

“So you’re out here doing tests?” she asked.

“That’s the idea.” He indicated the others. “Sandra is a gravity generator expert, Habib is our power systems engineer, and Sabine knows as much about WIMP shielding and associated technology as anyone I know. Best student I ever had.”

The younger woman looked mildly embarrassed but pleased at the praise.

“We’re going to test it on a small scale to begin with, using some of the asteroids as targets, loaded with small quantities of planium as a definite indicator of shielding issues,” Sandra said. “Since it’ll be pretty obvious if something goes wrong.”

Thinking back to twenty years ago, Alex couldn’t help but agree. She still saw that blue fireball in her nightmares sometimes.

“I hope it works,” she finally remarked, turning back to the console to double-check the physical indicators in a habit she’d never been able to break. “Sooner that bloody thing is gone the happier everyone will be.”

Even Hermes made a sound of agreement.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

January 2103
Oort Cloud, 231 AU From Sol
Onboard Charon Mass Disposal Ship Gatekeeper

#We have reached the calculated safe distance. Ready to fire.#

“Stand by.” Captain Roberts looked around the bridge of his ship, which was one of the largest so far built. The size of an old fashioned wet navy destroyer it had a complement of close to two hundred people, half of them scientists and the remainder crew. “Do we have final authorization?”

“You do, Captain. Proceed at your discretion.” General LeBatelier stood to the side at parade rest, his hands behind his back, watching calmly.

“Thank you, sir. Mackenzie, fire the WIMP beam torpedo, then jump us back to Pluto orbit as soon as you confirm detonation.”

#Yes, Captain. Torpedo accelerator online, target locked, distance ten AU. Threshold crossed, torpedo outbound blink completed, return blink completed… Detonation is confirmed.# The view in their n-links from the external cameras jumped and they were two hundred astronomical units away in microseconds.

“That was a slight anticlimax,” Captain Roberts commented mildly. “We won’t see the results for more than twenty seven hours.”

“I for one am perfectly happy to wait,” LeBatelier grunted, stretching a little. “I’d have been even happier to get that damn thing even further away, but everyone was starting to get restless about it. It’s far enough outsystem that all we’ll get is some gravity turbulence for a few hours and a nice light show, so that’s good enough for me. At least it’s gone now.”

“And we can stop worrying about alien super-weapons and start the real work,” Roberts chuckled.

“Until we find another one,” the general sighed. “Where there’s one, there may be more. But we will deal with that if and when it happens.”

“Would you like to join me for a meal?” Captain Roberts offered. “We’ve got some superb synth-steak in the galley.”

“Sounds like a good idea, Captain,” LeBatelier smiled. “Lead on.”

Both men left the bridge, the AI Mackenzie transferring command to himself as they did. While he waited for the pretty blue lights he pondered what the next years would bring with great interest.

Life, even for an AI, was very interesting these days, he decided.

Humans were great fun.

 

[mp3.1415player]

March 2109
Interstellar Survey Headquarters
Luna Prime Base

#The probe fleet reports another planium detection, John. The largest one yet by a huge margin.#

John Anderson, director of the IS, nodded absently as he went over the report that the AI Minerva had uploaded to his n-link even as she spoke. “Vastly more than we’ve found in any other location so far,” he commented, looking at the star map in his mindscape as he rotated it and zoomed in with instinctive mental operations. The map showed every star out to two hundred and fifty light years along with data on each one where available, including information on the ones that had so far been scanned in detail, which covered a much, much smaller volume.

Since there were at least a quarter of a million visible stars inside that spherical area, and possible at least as many again brown dwarfs, they hadn’t yet visited even a fraction of one percent of them in the five years the program had been running. The number of probe ships was steadily increasing though, the construction facility at the L4 point expanding rapidly and turning out craft at a very respectable rate. Mining operations in the asteroid belt in the last twenty years since the beginning of that part of humanity’s expansion into space had completely removed any problems of material availability, which wasn’t even taking into account the ease of bringing things from almost anywhere in the galaxy that was allowed by the blink drive.

Ships were being made by the thousands now, much like large trucks had been back in the fossil fuel era, and were becoming nearly as common and matter of fact. Space travel had gone from a purely research function in the late twentieth century through an expensive luxury in the mid twenty first, to something that these days was almost considered routine. To anyone under the age of forty, it was seen as entirely natural.

The simplicity of the blink drive itself once the basic operational theory was understood had made all the difference. Yes, it was a fearsomely complex machine in some ways, and required a very high level of technology, but as it was today it was not really much different from making a cutting edge internal combustion engine back in 2020 or so relative to the tech level then.

Admittedly one needed to understand WIMP theory to a fairly impressive level to know how it worked, but actually making one didn’t need a doctorate in the field. Merely a good education and a decent level of intelligence, which these days was basically everyone. Modern medical techniques, the omnipresence of n-links and AI, technology based on spintronics, and all the other things that had come about after the mad years, had changed everything to the point that someone from the beginning of the last century probably wouldn’t recognize it.

He was pretty sure that in another fifty years at most there would be humans of one sort or another all through the solar system and beyond. Already there were plans afoot for setting up colonies on the two potentially habitable planets that had been found around Alpha Centauri B, which had been the obvious first place to look once the interstellar program restarted after the Charon Mass had been rendered safe. And in that first year, people had jumped around all over the place almost randomly while the drive was tested properly, meaning that there were reams of information on widely scattered star systems across half the galaxy and even a couple in Andromeda when one test pilot got carried away with enthusiasm.

Fairly quickly the IGCC had called a halt to ad-hoc exploration, mainly due to a worry about accidentally triggering another planium weapon. Everyone was sure that the Promethians, or their enemies, would have left traces somewhere else other than the Sol system, and even with the latest shielding being considered about as close to perfect as possible, there was always the chance of an accident. The IS had been set up in late 2104 and exploration of new systems handed over to it, along with a list of standard protocols for discovery of planium weapons or deposits, contact with aliens, hostile or otherwise, and the location of habitable worlds.

People were fairly certain that sooner or later humanity would encounter another alien species, considering that at least two different ones had visited their home system in the reasonably recent past. But no one knew how long it would be until that happened, or what those aliens would be like. It might happen next week, it might take centuries, but it would happen eventually and they wanted to be prepared.

They also wanted to be absolutely sure that no planium was present in any system marked for eventual settlement. Every system surveyed was first scanned very thoroughly with sacrificial drones for the presence of the hellish material. The decision had been taken very early on that the presence of the substance in a system, unless there was something else there that made it of significant interest, would be sufficient cause to mark it as unsuitable and move on. If there was good reason to further study such a star system a decontamination operation would be put into action to remove all traces of the material.

Extremely cautious testing had shown that the latest shielding technology allowed planium to be transported by blink drive, although no one wanted to be on board a ship at the same time so the process would always be automated. Not even the AIs fancied the risk, which mildly amused John. So as and when planium was found, it would be transported to a safe place outside the galaxy where it wouldn’t be a problem. It could be studied there safely without risk to anyone, even if something catastrophic happened.

The end result of the Charon Mass destruction had produced a small black hole and an amazing display of light when it finally became visible to the inner system, easily viewable in daylight on Earth for several hours. No one wanted that sort of thing happening anywhere near an inhabited world. The research ship that was still studying the Charon Singularity was also towing it away on a course that was projected to eventually end up in intergalactic space. They had it up to nearly ten percent of c by this point. When they’d learned everything of interest from it, the thing would be abandoned to the depths of space, although it’s course would be logged so everyone could avoid it.

The plan was that the next weapon found would be just moved intact so it could be properly researched by remote, somewhere where a suddenly forming singularity along with a small nova-equivalent wouldn’t bother anyone. No one doubted that eventually one would turn up, since it seemed immensely unlikely that the one hidden inside Charon was the only one in existence. Where there was one of something there was quite likely more of them, after all.

Up until now, only small traces of planium had been found in widely scattered systems out to about thirty light years, and in one that was visited before the IS was set up, some two thousand light years closer to the galactic core. All of those traces suggested they were the result of some form of combat operation, being tiny amounts widely scattered across large areas of a planet, or in a couple of cases throughout an asteroid belt. The patterns bore an unnerving similarity to the result of the Mars PDE, which reinforced the thought that there had been some form of interstellar war fought with planium weapons. Considering no other traces of either side had yet come to light, this might well mean that both were now extinct. On the other hand, one or other side might still be out there licking their wounds and waiting...

The systematic search that had been going on for the last half decade had been expected to find more and more evidence of past battles, and looking at the data that had just arrived by courier drone, it has just managed to achieve that.

#Yes, the scans show it is in the same configuration as the Charon Mass was. Approximately sixty one kilotons of planium in a compact mass, inside a clearly artificial structure that’s concealed inside a small moon on the outer edge of the system. It bears striking similarities to Charon in most respects.# Minerva sounded thoughtful, as she brought up various data in his shared inner view. #Someone didn’t want this device to be found, obviously. The probe can detect no visible signs of manipulation of the surface of the moon, which as in the case of Charon either requires the mass to have been placed inside sufficiently long ago to have allowed normal micro-meteor bombardment and tidal stresses to have erased it, or shows that someone went to great effort to cover up the traces they left.#

“I certainly can’t see any other plausible way it could end up there, I agree,” he said. “And hiding something that dangerous in such a manner still looks more likely to be for nefarious purposes than otherwise. We won’t know until we can get at one safely and study it. And possibly not even then...”

#The deep scans show that the material surrounding the planium is an alloy of titanium, iridium, and silicon, with considerable quantities of a number of transuranic elements present. It’s not one we’ve encountered before, or considered, and is definitely the product of a very advanced technology. Additionally there are signs of what appears to be an artificially modified strong nuclear force which would significantly enhance the material’s physical properties.#

“I recall reading about some research into that recently,” he remarked, thinking back to a report from the IAP, which over the years had become the most advanced scientific institution on the planet. Not that it was entirely on the planet these days, considering how large the Ceres Secure Research Facility was becoming. The place was basically an extension of the IAP now. “It’s being studied for improving the strength of spacecraft hulls.”

#Yes, the research is very promising,# the AI replied, sounding pleased. #If the current development path pans out as it is suspected it will, we could be deploying it in under ten years.# She paused, then went on, #However, it is more evidence that the builders of these devices were at or beyond our current technological level. Presumably beyond that of the Promethians as well, since we know that that species didn’t appear to use spintronics. Although admittedly it’s possible that they deliberately omitted that technology in the Mars outposts. However, in any case I would expect that study of the device could yield important breakthroughs in a number of fields.#

“And enough planium to kill a system,” he grumbled. “We’ll need to get rid of that. Hopefully we can extract it without setting it off or destroying the remainder of the machine. If it’s booby-trapped, that might be difficult...”

#I suggest that standing a very long way away and using remote systems is probably a sensible precaution,# she said with dry wit. He chuckled at the comment. Minerva had a cutting sense of humor at times.

“That crossed my mind,” he smiled. “I hope that the latest research into real time superluminal comms bears fruit. It would help a lot with this sort of thing. The ping-pong comm system is a little too high-latency for real time control if you want high precision.”

#I believe the initial work is promising, but it’s another field where only time will tell,# she said. #We need to contact the IGCC about this discovery.#

“We do.”

The IGCC now included almost every government on Earth other than the insular Empire of Texas, which tended to keep to itself and just utter threats on occasion, and a couple of places in United Africa who had not yet made up their minds yet. It was pretty much a de facto planetary government even now and it was expected that within twenty or thirty years at the outside would become that in reality, uniting the planet fully for the first time in history. Evidence of potentially hostile aliens had helped a lot with making that possible, effectively completing what the Quick War had begun so horribly eighty years ago. He reported directly to them, and it was the IGCC’s military research arm that would decide what to do about this new problem and how.

In all truth he was glad of that. He and his people had their work cut out for them just finding things. What was done with those things later was someone else’s job. The IS was an exploratory group, not a military one, after all.

Seconds later John was placing an n-link call, soon finding himself networked in a virtual environment with the venerable and highly regarded General LeBatelier, who after nearly forty years was still in overall command of the CCF. Also present were Athena the IGCC primary AI, and several other people including the current IGCC Premier, Winston Clarke, a former President of the CAS and a highly regarded statesman with a distinguished career.

“We’ve found another Planium Mass,” he said when everyone had greeted the others, which didn’t take long in the shared mindscape. The slight delay between people on earth and him on Luna was mostly compensated for by the n-link system, but there was a minor and mildly irritating lag still present. Everyone was used to it and pretty much ignored it.

“Where?” LeBatelier immediately asked.

#It is orbiting the star HD40307 at a distance of just under two hundred and sixty-six light minutes, embedded in a small ice moon around a dwarf planet similar to Pluto,# Minerva said, her human-looking avatar that of a tall ice-blonde woman with a quick smile and green eyes. #The moon is half the size of Charon and consists mainly of water ice and ammonia, with a thin layer of rock deposited on top along with a number of cryogenic gasses such as helium and nitrogen. Unremarkable and typical of the sort of thing we’ve commonly found in that overall position on the outskirts of a star system.#

“I believe that HD40307 was one of the prime candidates for a habitable world?” Clarke asked.

#Yes, it’s been known since 2008 to have at least six planets orbiting it, one of which was thought to be likely to be roughly earth-like,# Minerva confirmed, nodding. #There was some doubt at the time as to whether that was accurate, due to problems with the early detection methods. In 2053 another set of measurements were taken with the Webb 2 telescope at the L2 point which confirmed the original readings and refined them to show there were in fact ten planets, two of which are fairly likely to be in the habitable range for unmodified humans. Our probes have shown that one of those is approximately twice the diameter of Earth but with an average density low enough that the surface gravity is only twenty percent higher, while the climate is easily survivable if slightly cold. The other one is almost a twin to Venus in most characteristics but is cooler, at the hot end of Earth but still habitable.”

“Do either have any signs of life?” Margaret O’Keefe, one of the scientific advisers to the IGCC, asked with interest.

“No. The smaller one, HD40307 h, appears to have a thin atmosphere mainly of nitrogen with trace inert gasses, while HD40307 i, the larger one, also seems lifeless although the atmospheric density is high enough that a human could survive on it with only an oxygen mask. Both have significant amounts of liquid water.” John looked around at them as he spoke, trying to gauge their thoughts. Athena, who used a female avatar in the link which was for reasons best known to her, petite with cat’s ears, smiled at him.

#We’ve known for decades that a number of exoplanets show signs of bearing life,# Minerva added. #This system didn’t have those signs, and a closer examination only backed that up. We’ve found at least a dozen more planets in the last two years that do have life of various sorts, although so far nothing intelligent, or traces of any civilization having either visited them or evolved on them.#

“Except for the planium fragments,” LeBatelier remarked sourly.

#Well, yes, that’s true, but only two cases so far have had planium present in a system that also possessed a habitable planet that had life on it,# the AI admitted. #And one of those only showed planium traces in the asteroid belt.#

“Even so, it’s pretty much proof of sapient life having been present at one point,” the general declared. “We still haven’t found any planium in a form that isn’t obviously manufactured or concentrated, so it’s quite possible the stuff is actually artificially created as we’ve suspected for years. If so, any system we find it in must have been visited by a space-capable species.”

“True, which the discovery of another Mass tends to support,” Clarke put in. “It concerns me. As the saying has it, once is an accident, twice is a coincidence...”

“I don’t need three of the damn things to think of them as enemy action,” LeBatelier said with a slight grin. “One was enough. We need to have a very careful look at this one. I would suggest that this is a good test case for moving it to the proposed extra-galactic safe zone for further research. If it works, wonderful, and if it doesn’t, we lose a system that’s got nothing particularly valuable in it we haven’t already found elsewhere.”

No one seemed to disagree. After a moment, John said, “We’ve transferred all the data on the system survey to you, and we’ve marked HD40307 as off limits to exploration until further notice. If you blow it up, let us know, will you?”

General LeBatelier looked amused. “We’ll try not to destroy a perfectly good star system. Thank you for the report, Professor Anderson, Minerva. You can leave it in our hands now.”

“Excellent. In that case, we’ll get back to work.” John nodded to the others. Minerva’s avatar did the same, then they both unlinked. Opening his eyes he looked at the small holoprojection on his desk where his AI colleague was looking back at him. “It’ll be interesting to see what they find.”

#Indeed it will. I am very curious to know who made the Masses and why.# She shook her simulated head. #Assuming we can ever discover that.#

“Time will tell. We’ve certainly got more than enough to keep us busy as it is.”

Sparing a few minutes for a cup of genuine coffee, John was soon immersed in other reports from probe missions spread out over a close to hundred light year sphere, Minerva aiding him even as she kept track of everything else in the IS.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

October 2109
31.8 AU from primary of HD40307
Onboard IGCC Research Ship Threshold

#TBT drive unit reports ready status, reactors at full power, capacitors charged, destination coordinates set for research area in sector A41Q,# the ship AI Neils said. #All personnel report to duty stations. Initiation of TBT operation begins in thirty seconds from… mark.#

There was a rush of crew to various seats. Even though essentially all functions for most systems were carried out via n-link, everyone had an assigned station and many of them also had holoprojectors. Some people preferred to look at things with their eyes, not their minds, even now.

Captain Hirase looked around, pleased at the quick response from his crew. Training paid off.

“Whatever happens, this should be interesting,” he commented.

#Undoubtedly, Captain,# Neils replied. #The consensus is that it will work, but if not, we will still make the Mass safe. Just somewhat spectacularly...#

Hirase nodded, smiling a little. He was keeping an eye on the timer in the corner of his vision rapidly counting down the seconds until the operation to move a six hundred and forty kilometer moon began. It would be over almost instantly one way or the other.

#Ten seconds,# Neils announced. #TBT drive online, accelerator at threshold. Awaiting go signal.#

As the timer hit zero, they blinked to a safe location on the other side of the system, while five seconds after that the drive on the moon they’d left behind activated. They watched through the near real time link to a probe orbiting the same dwarf planet the moon was.

When it, quietly and without fuss, simply vanished, everyone cheered.

Captain Hirase let them carry on for a little while, then said firmly, “Calm down, people. We know it left successfully, we need to find out if it arrived safely. Neils, take us to the rendezvous point and let’s see if we have an intact moon or a black hole.”

#Yes, Captain. Probe retrieved and docked, coordinates set… jump complete. Deploying probe to the transport destination...# Moments later they got an image from the deep scan system on the probe showing a bright spot in the middle of a misty complex mass that was the moon they’d just transported nearly ninety-two thousand light years in an instant, floating gently in the black of intergalactic space far outside the Milky Way. The visible light view only showed a black spot against the spectacular backdrop of the galaxy they’d come from. #We appear to have succeeded.#

“Wonderful.” His smile was much wider this time. “Now all we have to do is cut the damn moon up, get at that whatever-it-really-is without blowing it up, and try to figure out what it’s for and how it does it.”

#I still think the weapon theory is most likely, but I am intrigued to see if that’s the case,# Neils replied. #It will take some time to even begin to access the device, though, as we will have to proceed extremely carefully.#

“We’ve got time,” Hirase chuckled. “All the time in the world, really. Let’s get to work.”

The order went out, and other ships began appearing around them, as a complex scientific operation went into action.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

January 2112
2.4 light months from Arcturus, KO III star 36.7 light years from Sol
Onboard IS Scout Ship Seeker of Interesting Things

“What the hell…?!”

“That’s a lot of planium...”

#That’s far too much planium...#

All three of the scout’s occupants exchanged looks. Roland Warden, grandson of both of the famous inventors of the TBT drive that powered his own ship, was technically the commander of the small vessel, while his second in command and wife Sarah Kimura was the researcher. His own doctorate was in WIMP field research, while hers was biology and stellar mechanics, an odd but useful combination in the jobs they’d ended up with.

The third member of the crew, Isaac, the ship AI and close friend of the other two, was present as a full size holo projection, although he also had a human-form body stowed away for use on the ground. He claimed he enjoyed actually walking around on new planets, and it wasn’t the same without a body.

Most AIs thought he was a little weird.

So did most humans.

He merely grinned when this was commented on and ignored the opinions of others.

Roland and Sarah considered him part of the family, and he’d been best AI at their wedding.

“Six of the damn things?” Roland inspected the deep scan results with incredulity. “Christ. People are going to go insane when they see this. In eight years and over nine thousand star surveys we’ve only found two of them, and now there are six in the same system? Someone must really have hated whoever lived here if they put six system-killers in one place.”

“We still don’t know for sure that they’re weapons, love,” Sarah pointed out. “The IGCC investigation has only just got to the point of uncovering the HD40307 one after two and a half years of careful work, and they haven’t even started on the one found last year in the HD207098 system.”

#There’s something different about these two,# Isaac pointed out, highlighting a pair of the planium masses their distant remote probe array had found. #Neither of them appears to be buried inside anything. This one is orbiting the star about eighty light hours out, while the other one here is in orbit around the biggest gas giant in the system. All the others are concealed.#

Roland glanced at him, then his wife. “We could see what they look like without a few hundred kilometers of ice covering them,” he said, feeling excited. “That would be a first.”

“Let’s get one of the probes close enough to have see the gas giant one,” Sarah suggested. Quickly they commanded one of the two dozen remote units to jump to a safe distance from the detected planium concentration, then sent it in on AG drive while aiming the optical telescope at the alien machine.

Half a minute later they had a nice clear picture.

All of them studied it without talking for a little while.

Eventually Isaac said, very doubtfully, #If that’s not a weapon, someone went to a lot of trouble to make it look like one.#

“Yeah,” Roland agreed uneasily, as Sarah nodded. “Rail-gun, by the looks of it. One big enough to fire entire ships through.” He indicated the larger end of the device, which was apparently currently inert. There was a series of rings of an unfamiliar metal surrounding a large sphere of what they’d all have recognized instantly as planium even without the deep scan results. The dim glow was a dead giveaway that more or less everyone could spot at a glance, which normally was followed by rapid retreat.

“That thing is enormous,” Sarah said with a note of wonder overlaid with apprehension in her voice. “Both the arms are measuring as nearly fifteen kilometers long, and those rings in the fat end are over five kilometers across.”

#This part seems to be a power plant of some form,# Isaac said, highlighting a section right at the rear end of the massive device, assuming the two long protrusions were the front. #I think a variant of fusion. It’s completely cold at the moment, it obviously hasn’t been used for decades, probably centuries. No radiation at all, no thermal output, no electrical activity… The device is completely shut down, if not dead.#

“I sure wouldn’t want to assume it was dead,” Roland muttered. “We’re not going anywhere near that system. We’ll collect all the data we can from here then pass it on to people who get paid to risk their lives tinkering with bombs large enough to blow Mars into confetti.”

#I can’t say I disagree,# the AI nodded. Sarah, who was still studying the probe results very closely, did the same.

“Send another probe to the other one, let’s see if it’s also inert,” she suggested after a moment. Isaac did so, and a few minutes later they had an answer. “Yeah. Exactly the same, down to the centimeter. And dead as a rock from the appearance. I wonder what the hell they really are? We were thinking bomb but that looks a lot more like a cannon of some sort.”

#Possibly a shaped charge? Or it might be intended to use the planium as projectiles and fire them at a distant target,# Isaac replied.

“Maybe it’s a rocket. One that uses planium as fuel.” Roland grinned as the other two exchanged glances then stared at him.

“What’s it meant to move, stars?” Sarah sighed. “Look at it! That amount of planium is absolutely appalling. You know how much energy that would release if it detonated. If you want to push a planet around there are easier and safer ways to do it.”

He shrugged. “I have no idea. No one does. But we’ve found something that will make it easier to find out, assuming they don’t blow up in our faces when someone goes and pokes one.”

#That isn’t going to be me,# Isaac said with vehemence.

“Me either. Let’s send this data back home and move on to the next system,” Sarah commented. “And get something to eat, too, I’m starving.”

Shortly they’d sent a message courier drone back to IS headquarters, had lunch, and blinked away to investigate the next star on the enormous list that would take the Survey group decades to deal with.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

March 2114
International Governmental Cooperation Committee Building
Extrasystem Control Group

“...and the two new settlements on Delta Pavonis d are expanding rapidly. Despite the slightly higher gravity, we have more people applying for permission to relocate than we currently have resources to construct living space. There is some concern that environmental damage could result if we don’t create more settlements in suitable locations. As such we would like to request an upgrade to a class one colony world from a class two, to increase the resources we can call on.”

The governor of the Delta Pavonis system sat again with a polite nod to the assembled people.

#Please vote on the proposal to upgrade the status of Delta Pavonis d to a class one colony system,# Athena said. Her avatar looked around, which was only really for the benefit of the fairly small number of people physically present. Everyone else was linking into the virtual duplicate of the room in the n-link mindscape. #Vote passes, one hundred and forty eight to one.#

“Thank you, Governor Bishara.” The IGCC premier nodded politely to the other man. “Please report back in six months as to the progress you’ve made so we can make sure things are going smoothly.”

“Of course, sir. Thank you all for your time.” He disappeared as his holo deactivated.

“Now, next order of business. The Arcturus system, the six Planium Masses found there two years ago, and the study into their function and makers. Doctor Warden, it’s a pleasure to see you again after so long.”

The famous physicist nodded back with a smile. “It’s a pleasure on my part too, Premier Clarke.” Now seventy-eight, someone from the twentieth century would have pegged his age at a robust early forties. Medical technology had already extended the human lifespan to at least a projected two centuries and was steadily improving, even before the experimentation in mind uploads which could well become feasible in a few years were taken into account. “These last few years have been fascinating. We’ve learned a lot about the device creators, and are very close to cracking the encryption on the computers they contain, we think.”

“For the benefit of those who may not have kept up on the research, can you quickly provide a summary for the situation to date, please?” Clarke asked.

“Of course. As everyone is aware, the devices were initially thought to be weapons of enormous destructive potential. All the evidence we originally gathered supported that theory, and until very recently we had no good reason to believe otherwise. Up to the Arcturus discovery a little more than two years ago, all three of the devices we knew about had been buried deep inside small moons, in what was obviously an attempt at concealing them.” Doctor Warden looked around at the various representatives present, a few of them nodding as they listened.

“We moved the first two complete with their moons to the test zone far outside the galactic perimeter to ensure that in the event of an accident, no damage would be done. As we still don’t know who made them or precisely why, or for that matter how long ago, we can’t be sure that they’re not monitored in some manner either, so that is also a sensible reason to move them to a distant location. If the worst happens and we get a visit from hostile aliens, they would find only a small research facility which we would hopefully have time to evacuate before they arrived.”

“Do you think that is likely, Doctor?” one of the EA ministers asked.

“Not particularly, no, or someone would have come looking when we dealt with Charon,” he replied. “However our military colleagues put it forward as a concern so we have to take it seriously, however unlikely.”

“I see. Thank you.”

“My pleasure. Now, the Arcturus find changed everything. We had almost finished carefully removing the covering material from the HD40307 device when the IS team located six more of the things, including two that were fully exposed. One was orbiting the primary unaccompanied while the other was in orbit around a gas giant. The remaining four were encased in ice and rock as in the case of the previous three. We moved all six of them to widely separated locations in the test zone and began very carefully examining the two exposed ones. Both of them are identical, showing signs of mass production. Based on the readings from the buried ones, and records of the Charon Mass, we are confident that they’re all the same device.”

“But you don’t know yet what it’s for?” Premier Clarke asked.

“No, not with any degree of certainty,” Doctor Warden replied, shaking his head. “A weapon is still considered a likely scenario.” He pointed to the high resolution image of one of the alien devices that appeared in the middle of both the physical room and the virtual one, everyone present examining it. “The two spikes or rails coming out what we’ve decided is probably the front end suggest a mass accelerator of some form. Considering the sheer size, it would be very potent indeed. The huge planium mass is in the form of a perfect sphere made of essentially pure planium, which is held in place in the center of the gap at the back and those rings, which as best we can determine at this point form some type of enormous power supply.”

He highlighted each point as he spoke.

“We’ve known since the very first time we studied planium recovered from the Mars Event that in theory it could be used as an energy source if you were crazy enough not to worry about the excessively high risk of catastrophic failure,” he carried on. “Right at the back here is a fusion generator that feeds an excitation system in the rings, which as far as we can tell shape and control the energy released from applying a large electrical charge to the planium core. For what end we’re not quite sure yet. One possibility is to fire projectiles at extremely high speed down the rails, making it a giant rail gun. Possibly using the planium itself as the payload as well, since you would only need a small amount which could be accelerated to a very large fraction of c with this machine.”

He paused, then went on, “Based on research into the material combined with the latest WIMP theory, it is possible that superluminal velocities could be reached in real space.”

Everyone stared at the machine, then him.

“I didn’t think that was possible,” the EA minister said, sounding astounded.

“It was a somewhat surprising outcome when we were initially studying the stuff years ago,” Warden replied with a wave of one hand. “Not everyone believed it, and we’ve never dared play with it enough to find out for certain. WIMP theory does allow for superluminal particles if you look at it in the right way, and there is considerable research ongoing into realizing technology that could utilize the effect if real. Based on more recent studies into planium, though, we think it may just be possible to use it to get the same result, albeit nowhere near as efficiently, with very simple machinery.”

“Do you have any idea of the potential speeds one could achieve using that method?” someone else asked.

“It’s a little complex to answer that simply, but a ballpark figure of perhaps seven and a half thousand times the speed of light seems plausible. It sounds like a lot, but that’s barely twenty light years per day. Compared to the TBT drive, it’s a toy. And that’s leaving aside the problems of planium instability and toxicity, of course.”

“Interesting. And you believe this machine might make use of that effect?”

“We suspect so but without activating one, at the moment we can’t be sure. And no one is keen on doing that, even if we knew how. If it really is a weapon, we don’t know what would happen, and if it’s not, we really don’t know what would happen.” He shrugged. “More study is required. Once we get into the computers we’ll probably learn a lot more very quickly but until then we’re disinclined to experiment too much. No one wants to see that much planium go up again if they can avoid it.”

“I can’t say I blame you, Doctor,” Premier Clarke commented with a wry smile. “Once was enough.”

“Definitely.”

“How close is your group to accessing the computers?”

“It’s very difficult to put numbers to it,” the physicist replied. “The technology is surprisingly primitive in some ways. We were expecting advanced spintronic arrays, while what we found was fairly basic quantum computing. That said, the encryption algorithms are very good indeed and even our best AIs are having some trouble with it. We’re certain we’ll manage it sooner or later, but estimates as to when are between a week and a decade.”

“Something of a wide range of times,” the other man noted.

“Unfortunately, yes. We suspect that once we’ve successfully cracked one, we’ll learn enough to make subsequent efforts far easier, but this is an entirely alien technology we’re working on, with a completely unknown history.”

“Don’t worry, Doctor, no one is upset. Your progress has been remarkable to date and you personally are responsible for a lot of our current technological progress.”

“I had a lot of help,” Warden smiled. “I can’t take credit for that. It was very much a group effort.”

“Even so. Take as long as you need. We’re all sure you’ll succeed in the end and we await the results with enormous interest.”

“Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best and keep you all updated on our progress.”

“Excellent.” Premier Clarke scanned the room. “In that case, I believe it’s time to break for lunch. We’ll continue in ninety minutes with the next item on the agenda, the proposal from the CCF that we expand the deep array to continuous operation around all inhabited systems. Please consider the subject carefully, and we’ll meet back here after lunch.”

The people physically present stood up while those who were only there via n-link began to disappear. Doctor Warden headed for the door with the rest, all of them looking forward to a meal after a long morning session.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

December 2114
3 light months from HD1388, G2V star 85.3 light years from Sol
Onboard IS Scout Ship Seeker of Interesting Things

“Why are we all the way out here?” Sarah asked, hands on hips, as she stared at her husband and their currently embodied AI colleague, who were playing cards in the mess room. “This is at least eighteen light years away from the search radius we’re meant to be in.”

“Beer?” Isaac offered, holding up a container produced by the food system, while wearing a grin on his remarkably punchable synthetic face.

It really was. People had punched him in it twice in just the last two years. It might have also had something to do with his general attitude of laid-back sarcasm. Even some other AIs found him irritating at times.

“Oh, god. Let’s not go there again,” she said, although she took the beer away. “Explain.”

“With the number of new ships that have joined the survey group in the last six months, we thought we were in danger of getting overtaken,” Roland said with a smile, not looking up from his hand. “We have a reputation to uphold.”

“One of getting drunk and starting brawls in bars, mostly,” she snarked.

“Hey, you started the last one,” he pointed out with a smirk.

“And I finished it too,” the woman chuckled as she sat down. “Deal me in. And tell me what we’re doing out here specifically.”

“HD1388 is almost a twin to Sol. It’s a high probability candidate for life bearing planets.” Roland dealt her some cards as he spoke. “We thought we’d look through the list for something interesting and this one seemed like a good idea. So we decided to check it out.”

“While I was asleep, I can’t help but notice,” she said acidly, looking at her hand.

“We didn’t want to wake you up for such a minor deviation from normal routine,” Isaac replied, then added, “Two.” He discarded a pair of cards and accepted the new ones.

“You two are bad enough on your own and a bloody nightmare when you combine what passes for your minds,” Sarah grumbled. “Three.” She took the cards. “Welcome to the future. We had organic idiots, so we had to invent synthetic ones.”

Isaac grinned at her over his cards, while Roland chuckled.

“Give it twenty years and there won’t be much difference between organic and synthetic,” he said.

“Have you at least deployed the array?” she asked with a sigh.

“Of course we did,” her husband said indignantly. “We got drunk afterwards.”

“Idiots. I’m surrounded by idiots.”

Moments later an alert sounded, causing all three of them to check the system. “Holy shit.”

Sarah looked at her husband. He looked back. Isaac looked at both of them.

“No planium, but that’s way more interesting,” the AI finally said.

“What, the planet with all the spacecraft around it and the orbital elevator, or the ship that’s heading out of the system in our direction?” Russell inquired as they watched through the probe array while a fairly impressively large ship accelerated on a pair of white spears of fusion flame.

When it abruptly went all wibbly and disappeared, all three of them went quiet.

“I’m going to say the ship,” Isaac finally said. “That was an FTL drive.”

“Yeah. And it wasn’t a blink drive,” Roland nodded. “Based on the WIMP detectors, I think it was some weird variation on a positive gravity drive combined with maybe that old Alcubierre drive concept. The one that no one could work out how to make work and gave up on when the TBT drive was invented.”

“Can the array pick up any radio or other EM broadcasts?” Sarah asked even as she was fiddling with the system. Isaac managed to get there first, as was usually the case.

“This looks like a digital video signal,” he said, going through various techniques and trying to find out what the format was. “Trinary encoding, not encrypted… huge color space. Huh. Interesting, I wonder what that says about their eye… Aha! There we go.”

A superb quality video image appeared in their shared mindscape, the content of which appeared to be some sort of documentary at a guess.

“Wow.” Sarah’s mouth fell open in surprise and delight. “They’re giant bugs.”

“Looks like it. Pretty, too. Like huge preying mantises.” Roland studied the video as the two aliens depicted seemed to demonstrate the operation of something that looked like a welder of some form. “Well, I think we just earned our pay for this week. We’d better get the array stowed and get home to tell them about it. Looks like we just found the first contact scenario everyone’s been worried about for decades.”

“Yeah. Think they’re the Device builders?” Sarah asked as they issued the commands to the probe network that caused them to sequentially blink back to the ship and dock. Under three minutes later they were ready to leave, and ten seconds after that Luna flight control was asking slightly puzzled questions.

“Doubt it. No planium, and that drive of theirs gave off enough WIMP flux to detonate it from a thousand kilometers away.” Isaac shook his head as he moved his body into the storage slot and shut it down. #They’re someone else. But they’ve got some decent tech. I wonder if they want to be friends?#

“Hopefully,” Sarah replied as the ship headed for the nearest dock. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

February 2115
Planium Device Test Area
Onboard IGCC Research Ship Threshold

“An FTL transportation device?!”

“Yes. That seems to be the case.” Doctor John Warden shook his head. “According to the computer data, these things are used in pairs to transport ships over up to several thousand light years point to point. Not as fast as the TBT drive, nothing like the range, and severely limited in destination since you need one at each end, but the ship can be quite primitive. It would need to be fairly solidly built to take the stresses but aside from that something nearly as simple as our first interplanetary ships would have done the job. And it’s old. Very, very old, if the star data we downloaded is to be believed.”

“How old is very, very old?”

“Based on stellar drift measurements on a small number of distant galaxies we could positively identify...” John hesitated, then finished, “Close to a billion years. Although we can’t be certain that this particular machine is that old, only that the data set is. But considering the way the strong nuclear force has been artificially enhanced in the alloy it’s constructed from, it’s not impossible it’s genuinely that old.” He shook his head in wonder. “At a minimum, based on the decay products we detected in the reactor core, it’s at least half a million years old. And it was turned off around fifty thousand years ago.”

Captain Hirase gaped for a second, then looked thoughtful. And worried. “That figure seems… familiar.”

“That’s what we all thought,” John admitted. He looked at the holo of what they now knew was a giant and hideously dangerous transport terminal. “What happened fifty thousand years ago, plus or minus about a millennium? Where did the people who were using these things go? Who were they? We’re certain they didn’t actually make the things, the tech in them is quite different to the small amounts of Promethian technology we recovered on Mars. Were the Promethians using them? If so, who wiped them out? And did they use the things? How many other alien species were using them, and where are they? And so on. Every question raises three more.”

“Can they be activated?”

“We could do that, yes. I don’t think it’s a good idea. We’re almost certain that there could be a very unfortunate interaction with the WIMP flux of our technology even with the shielding if that much planium was energized all at once. We’re going to have to improve it some more to make that aspect safer, but with the new data we have that should be possible.”

#I wonder if anyone is still around using these devices somewhere?# Neils said, sounding quizzical.

“Who knows? The galaxy is a very large place. We could be looking for years before we happened to trip over them, especially if they’re on the other side of the core,” John replied. “And they’re unlikely to trip over us, or any other species that uses different technology. They’d be limited to destinations in close proximity to one of these… terminals, unless they didn’t mind very long very slow FTL journeys. Perhaps that’s the case, but we simply don’t know. What we do know is that we’ll need to be very careful if we happen to locate anyone using technology based on those things. Depending on how much planium they use the results could be horrifying. Hopefully they realize how dangerous it is and minimize the amount they’ve got lying around, but...” He shrugged.

“We don’t know.”

“I would assume that anyone who started experimenting with planium would be bright enough to work out the problems with it sooner or later,” Captain Hirase remarked.

“You’d think so, yes. We may find out one day. Until then, we need to design new protocols to minimize any possible interaction with planium-using species. And keep moving these things somewhere safe so no one unexpectedly comes through one and causes a disaster.”

#They don’t appear to be common considering how many systems we’ve surveyed to date, with only three other sites with the machines so far located,# Neils said. #I would assume that the Arcturus site was a hub in any network that might exist, and it was obviously not in use. Possibly moving them all here will prevent unexpected guests before we can enact countermeasures to protect them and ourselves.#

“With any luck, yes. But we’re going to need to be even more cautious from now on. And keep studying the data from the devices. We’ve only scratched the surface so far.” John moved to a chair and sat down, staring at the slowly rotating depiction of the giant machine fifty light hours away, safely out of range. “The funny thing is that even knowing what it is, I still can’t shake the feeling it’s a weapon of some sort too. I have no idea why.”

“It’s odd you say that, because I’ve got the same feeling,” the captain said, sitting next to him. “We’ve been thinking that so long it’s habit, perhaps.”

“Maybe.” John stared a little more, then shook his head and deactivated the projector. “I’m heading back to Earth for a meal with my grandson and his wife to celebrate their latest discovery. Their team does seem to be living up to its ship name. Seeker of interesting things indeed.”

#Perhaps they should seek slightly less interesting things for a while,# Neils quipped. #The last two have been almost too interesting.#

“Tell me about it. Six Planium Devices and now a species of sapient insects with FTL technology,” John said with a good natured shake of his head. “I have no idea what comes next but I’m slightly dreading it. Oh well. We’ll soon see what these bugs are like, the first contact teams are due to go out next year sometime. Be interesting to see if they're friendly.”

“Give my best to your grandson and his wife,” Captain Hirase smiled. “And good work. We’re learning a lot.”

“We’ve got some very good people working on it,” John replied as he left with a wave. “See you tomorrow.”

 

[mp3.1415player]

That's it for now, but in due course it's highly likely that more words will join these words to form a larger number of words. Yay!

 

[Sablonus]

Something new in Creative Writing, huh? I wonder who-

Oh.

O-Oh.

 

[Lector]

2nd. Wonder how this will affect update rate of Bolo

 

[xThomas]

"happy sounds"

I enjoyed reading this. I can't wait to meet the Mass Effect species!

 

[Teal_Thanatos]

bugs. Rachni??? It looks like they're the most likely candidate

 

[DCG]

New friends! Yay.

 

[ManifestElements]

Rachni would be sweet. But since when do Rachni use technology that blows up Element Zero? So I doubt its them. Which is a damn shame, since I was REALLY hoping we'd get first contact with one of the citadel races when the chapter said they spotted some new civilization. Hope we get to that soon. Other than the issue with the Mass Relays, this doesn't feel very much like a Mass Effect story so far. Top notch quality writing, though.

 

[loganSB]

This is interesting.

Differently from the masses, I'm usually not a lover of the "anti-HFY" group, but the premise of this story is great and the execution is very well done.

About the bugs, if this isn't AU I doubt it is the Rachni, since if I'm not mistaken the war already happened a while ago... Still, I remember the Reapers usually purged advanced civilizations when they progressed on a technological path different from the one they wanted... and some purges were quite recents according to planet ruins in the game.

Maybe these bug aliens are one of those races that humanity found before the Reapers? Still, this beg the question as of why the Reaper haven't done so to Humanity already.

Maybe removing the Charon relay instead of interacting with it disrupted their means of controlling them?

Who knows, waiting to read more.

It's entirely impossible to please everyone at the same time with anything.​

Click to shrink...

Yes, that is one of the reason I'm rarely writing nowadays, even with my subpar works, it was becoming too tedious trying to make the story interesting for as many readers as possible...

 

[Jerion 'Wyverntamer' Kràl]

Oh, this is going to be so much fun! I can't wait to see their reactions to Asari.

 

[Lammy202]

This. This is the good stuff. Very much looking forward to more.

 

[Bev]

“Welcome to the future. We had organic idiots, so we had to invent synthetic ones.”

Click to shrink...

I'll be honest, if we do make AI's and teach them, let them roam around the internet or such, they'll probably just conclude that being humanities Overlord is like herding cats, too much stress for almost, maybe a negligeable return.

The more logical AI's would probably find a nice cushy job while the excentriques would emulate humans far too much to be healthy.

Im my opinion anyways, thoughts?

 

[Korlan]

I will be very interested in the reaction of the Council races (particularly the Asaris) when they learn how easy it is to destabilize Eezo by accident. (And I really mean accident, as in "Oh f*ck!!")

Their toughts when the Council will understand that they live inside the biggest BOOM waiting to happen in the entire Galaxy will be hilarious.

 

[Bev]

I think when the council offers the a place in the Citadel humanites answer would be a polite "No thank you" to a crass "Are you out of your effin mind?"

And the Asari would probably be very put out that the species close to their form would be very afraid to go near them... and probably would insist on video-conference for any meeting XD

 

[Korlan]

And the Asari would probably be very put out that the species close to their form would be very afraid to go near them... and probably would insist on video-conference for any meeting XD

Click to shrink...

There will be no "probably".


No sane(ish) human will ever accept to be anywhere near an Asari, even a dead one.

As Human laws will almost certainly ban any import of Eezo in Human space, any Asari attempting to cross Human borders might be considered an attempt to smuggle a WMD.

Speak about "Persons of Mass Destructions"

 

[Starfox5]

Humans might visit Asari worlds, though.

 

[Virian]

Humans might visit Asari worlds, though.

Click to shrink...

That would be like a living torch visiting a world made of Explodium. There are less explosively murderous ways to die

 

[Darklooshkin]

As Human laws will almost certainly ban any import of Eezo in Human space, any Asari attempting to cross Human borders might be considered an attempt to smuggle a WMD.

Click to shrink...

"Jesus Christ, that interstellar war must have been a doozy."

"Uh, why?"

"Get this-those blue alien space babes that live for literal millennia and basically have a huge urge to have every other species' babies that just so happen to also turn into hot blue alien space babes? Their Dark Energy readouts are off the charts."

"... Okay, so?"

"So each one of them is packing at least a couple of megatons worth of boom in their boobs alone."

"Wait, you mean-"

"That someone genetically engineered an entire species to be city-killing suicide bombers? That's exactly what I mean."

"Holy shit. This is even worse than we thought, isn't it?"

"Ayup. Also, they pack Jedi powers. Just saying."

"... For Fuck's sake. Is there any good news?"

"They... Uh... Think we're hot?"

*Facepalm*

 

[mp3.1415player]

2nd. Wonder how this will affect update rate of Bolo

Click to shrink...

Shouldn't affect it too much as I'm already very slow on that

"happy sounds"

I enjoyed reading this. I can't wait to meet the Mass Effect species!

Click to shrink...

This will happen, but there's at least one more chapter before that.

bugs. Rachni??? It looks like they're the most likely candidate

Click to shrink...

Rachni would be sweet. But since when do Rachni use technology that blows up Element Zero? So I doubt its them. Which is a damn shame, since I was REALLY hoping we'd get first contact with one of the citadel races when the chapter said they spotted some new civilization. Hope we get to that soon. Other than the issue with the Mass Relays, this doesn't feel very much like a Mass Effect story so far. Top notch quality writing, though.

Click to shrink...

They're definitely not the Rachni. Nor are they left over Vesprin. But there are enough clues present to work out where I borrowed the idea from

This is interesting.

Differently from the masses, I'm usually not a lover of the "anti-HFY" group, but the premise of this story is great and the execution is very well done.

About the bugs, if this isn't AU I doubt it is the Rachni, since if I'm not mistaken the war already happened a while ago... Still, I remember the Reapers usually purged advanced civilizations when they progressed on a technological path different from the one they wanted... and some purges were quite recents according to planet ruins in the game.

Maybe these bug aliens are one of those races that humanity found before the Reapers? Still, this beg the question as of why the Reaper haven't done so to Humanity already.

Maybe removing the Charon relay instead of interacting with it disrupted their means of controlling them?

Who knows, waiting to read more.

Click to shrink...

They're a good distance from a Relay, and evolved (like humanity) into a technological species much more rapidly than is common, so they weren't a 'threat' to the Reaper plan the last time anyone checked...

Hopefully the story will make everyone amused when reading it as much as it does me to write it.

Yes, that is one of the reason I'm rarely writing nowadays, even with my subpar works, it was becoming too tedious trying to make the story interesting for as many readers as possible...

Click to shrink...

The key there is to not even bother. You write, firstly and most importantly, for your own enjoyment. If other people like it too it's a bonus, but unless you're doing it for money it's optional

Ideally those who don't like it will just move on without getting all funny about it, but people being people, well...

Oh, this is going to be so much fun! I can't wait to see their reactions to Asari.

Click to shrink...

#Oh holy fuck she's riddled with planium run away run away what the fuck help save us...#

"You're an AI for gods sake! Have more decorum."

#Sorry. Ahem. Shall we leave?#

"Fucking right we're going. Hurry up!"

I'll be honest, if we do make AI's and teach them, let them roam around the internet or such, they'll probably just conclude that being humanities Overlord is like herding cats, too much stress for almost, maybe a negligeable return.

The more logical AI's would probably find a nice cushy job while the excentriques would emulate humans far too much to be healthy.

Im my opinion anyways, thoughts?

Click to shrink...

You also have to remember these are human AIs, based on human intelligence. That has... effects.

I will be very interested in the reaction of the Council races (particularly the Asaris) when they learn how easy it is to destabilize Eezo by accident. (And I really mean accident, as in "Oh f*ck!!")

Their toughts when the Council will understand that they live inside the biggest BOOM waiting to happen in the entire Galaxy will be hilarious.

Click to shrink...

Can an Asari go so pale she's actually white?

Humans might visit Asari worlds, though.

Click to shrink...

Oh, yeah, they'll absolutely love the idea of going to a planet that has gigaton-class living warheads wandering around on it...

 

[Starfox5]

Oh, yeah, they'll absolutely love the idea of going to a planet that has gigaton-class living warheads wandering around on it...

Click to shrink...

"Why are we doing this?"
"Blue Alien Babes who think we're hot."
"Right!"

 

[Engineer455]

Still, this beg the question as of why the Reaper haven't done so to Humanity already.

Click to shrink...

because if they even go remotely close to a human ship their gonna go up like fucking popcorn

 

[Matrix Dragon]

Still, this beg the question as of why the Reaper haven't done so to Humanity already.

Click to shrink...

The only Reaper actually in the galaxy at the moment is Sovereign, and he's busy dealing with another probl-

"WHO THE FUCK BROKE THE CITADEL?!"

That, yes. So even if he's noticed the Charon Relay being moved (Which might not be the case, given it was turned off and buried), he's got more immediate concerns.