Omega

It had taken almost two years to get the joint assignment to the Heffernan, but it had happened, largely because the Academy had a policy of trying to keep its captains happy.

They were both on the bridge, sharing, after all these years, their first moment of danger. The danger was remote, fortunately, but it added a dash of spice to the experience.

“Ajax has closed to four klicks,” said Bill. “Contact in eleven minutes.”

They could see Ajax, which looked like an insect, wings and legs spread, angling toward the spiked surface.

“Is it going to work?” asked Sky.

“If it’s what we think it is, Ajax will find the frequency and interfere with the magnetic belt. That should be enough. If it isn’t, it’ll start cutting the thing up with its lasers. One way or another, yes, it should work.”

Sky listened to the i

They talked occasionally about retirement, about her getting a job at home, maybe having the child they’d always promised themselves. Can’t really do that if you’re bottled up inside a container all the time. Virtual beaches are all right for adults, but a kid needs real sand.

Emma, reading his thoughts, nodded. “Time for something new?” she suggested.

“I don’t know,” he said uncertainly.

“There is this, Sky. Where else could we be this useful?”

Can’t hug her. Not while under acceleration. So he reached over and took her hand.

“Five minutes,” said Bill. “We are ready to jump on command.”

One of the screens carried the cloud, its image captured live through the telescopes. Sky thought the omegas possessed an ethereal kind of beauty. Not this one, because it was too dark, there wasn’t enough light hitting it. But when they got lit up by sunlight, they were actually very striking. He gri

Emma couldn’t see it. She thought they were the embodiment of pure malevolence. A demonstration that there were devils loose in the universe. Not the supernatural kind, of course. Something far worse, something that really existed, that had left its footprint among the stars, that had designed booby traps and sent them out to kill strangers.

Sky had grown up with the notion that evil inevitably equated to stupidity. The symbol of that idea was embodied in the fact that superluminals were not armed, that no one (other than fiction writers) had ever thought of mounting a deck gun on an interstellar vessel.

It was a nice piece of mythology. But mythology was all it was.

“Two minutes.” Bill loved doing countdowns. There was a picture of him on the auxiliary screen, sitting in an armchair, still safely tucked inside his suit, and with his helmet visor down.

“Bill, ready to bail if we have to.” There was no way to be sure the energy levels of the hedgehog were all the same.

“We are QBY,” he said. Ready to go. Bill favored the official terminology. He sometimes admitted to Sky that he regretted that starship life was so peaceful. He talked occasionally, and wistfully, of ru

Bill, this Bill, had a poetic streak. Sometimes he went a bit over the top, but he did seem to have a passion for flowers and sunsets and the wind in the trees. All a facade, of course. Bill had never experienced any of that, wasn’t even self-aware if you believed the manual. Furthermore, although the Academy AIs were compatible, and in fact most people thought there was really only one Academy AI, which sometimes simply got out of contact with its various parts, Sky knew that Bill was different on different ships. Sometimes the manifestation was withdrawn and formal, seldom showing up visually, and then usually in dress whites; on other vessels, on the Quagmire, for example (which Sky had piloted on a couple of missions), he’d been young, energetic, always advancing his opinion, usually in a jumpsuit with the ship’s patch on his shoulder. The Heffernan AI was philosophical, sometimes sentimental, inclined to quote Homer and Milton and the Bible. And apparently a fan of melodrama.

Sky was one of the few Academy captains who believed that a divine force functioned in the universe. He’d heard Hutch say one time that the notion of a God was hard to accept out here because of the sheer dimensions of the cosmos. Richard Feynman had made a comment to that effect. “The stage is just too big.” Why create something so enormous? Why make places so far away that their light will never reach the Earth?

But that was the reason Sky believed. The stage is immense beyond comprehension. The fallacy in Hutch’s reasoning, he thought, was the assumption that the human race was at the center of things. That we were what it was all about. But Sky suspected the Creator had made everything so large because He simply liked to create. That’s what creators do.

“Twenty seconds,” said Bill.

He watched the package move in. The hedgehog was rotating, slowly, once every thirty-seven minutes. The others rotated at different rates. It depended on the gravity fields they’d passed through.

“Ten.”

It closed and snuggled in against one of the object’s 240 sides.

“Contact.”

“Very good, Bill.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He looked over at Emma.

“Bill,” she said, “proceed with Ajax.”

“Proceeding.” And, a moment later: “Lockdown.” The magnetic couplers took hold. There had been a possibility that might have been enough to detonate the thing, but Emma hadn’t thought so. If it had no more stability than that, it would have gone up long ago. Objects drifting through interstellar space are bathed by particles and gravitons and you name it.

“You know,” said Emma, “I think I’m going to enjoy blowing this son of a bitch to hell.”

“There’s nobody in it.”

“Doesn’t matter.” She looked over at him. Her eyes were green, and they were smoldering. She didn’t share his faith in a benign creator, but she felt that the universe should be a place of pristine beauty and wonder. And most of all it should be neutral, and not loaded against intelligence. We’re the only reason there’s any point to it, she believed. Unless there’s someone smart enough to look at it, and appreciate its grandeur, and do the science, the universe is meaningless.

“Are we ready to pull the trigger?” Sky asked.

“Just enjoying the moment,” she said.

“Fire when ready, babe.”

She checked the status board. All green. “Bill,” she said.

“Locked and loaded.”

“Proceed to degauss.”

“Activating.” His image vanished. He was all business now.

Sky watched the time tick off. “Would the reaction be instantaneous?” he asked.

“Hard to say. But I’d think so.”

“I do not detect a change in the object’s magnetic signature.”

“Doesn’t work?” asked Sky.

“Let’s give it a little more time.”

The hedgehog was getting smaller as the Heffernan continued to withdraw.

“Still no change,” said Bill.

“Maybe it’s not antimatter?”

“It might be that we don’t have enough energy to shut it down. Or that we haven’t calibrated correctly. Or who knows what else? It’s not exactly my field.” She took a deep breath, “You ready to go to phase two, Sky?”

“Yes. Do it.”

“Bill?”

“Yes, Emma?”

“Activate the blade.” The laser.

“Activating blade.”

“Can you enhance the picture?” Sky asked.

“Negative. We are at maximum definition now.”

Emma had told him it would probably take time, but Sky kept thinking about Terry Drafts poking a laser into its shell. The record showed that once you did that, things happened pretty quickly. But some parts of the object might be more vulnerable than others.

Sky was begi

ARCHIVE

No one denies that the effort to find a way to dispose of the omega clouds is of value. But they do not constitute a clear and present danger. They are in fact so remote a hazard that it remains difficult to understand why so many continue to get exercised over the issue. At a time when millions go hungry, when repairing environmental damage is exhausting vast sums of money, when the world population steams ahead, we can ill afford to waste our resources on a threat that remains so far over the horizon that we ca

— Moscow International

April 5

chapter 14

Arlington.

Monday, April 4.

ASQUITH NEVER REALLY looked happy, except when VIP visitors were present. This morning, which was rainy, gloomy, and somehow tentative, was momentarily devoid of VIPs. The commissioner was making the kinds of faces that suggested he was tired of hearing about problems that didn’t go away. “So we know the hedgehogs—can’t we get a better name for them, Hutch? — are bombs. Tell me about the one that’s going to pass close to us. Tony’s going to be over this afternoon, and I need some answers. What happens if it goes off?”

Tony was the ultimate VIP: the NAU’s funding liaison with the Academy.

“You don’t have to worry about it, Michael. It’s as far away as the cloud is. It can’t hurt us.”

“Then why are we worried about it?”

“We aren’t worried in the sense that it can do any damage to us. Not at its current range. Maybe in a few centuries.”

“Then why do we care about it?”

“Because we don’t know its purpose.”

“So we’re talking a purely academic issue? Nobody’s at risk?”

“No.”

He’d gotten up when she came into the room. Now he eased himself back into his chair. “Thank God for that,” he said. He motioned her to a chair. “Why would anybody be putting bombs out there?”

“We think they’re triggers.”

“Triggers. Bombs. We’re arguing terminology.” He rolled his eyes. “What do they trigger?”