Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 12

A CRUDE MANNER OF SPEAKING, BUT YET. I AM BRINGING US INTO A SLOPING.

ORBITAL CHANGE, WHICH SHALL END WITH A HOVERING POSITION ABOVE THE.

CORONAL ARCH. AS YOU ORDERED.

Claire struggled to her hands and knees. Was that malicious glee in Erma's voice? Did personality sims feel that? "What's local gravity?"

27.6 EARTH GRAVITIES.

"What! Why didn't you tell me?"

I DID NOT THINK OF IT MYSELF UNTIL I BEGAN REGISTERING EFFECTS IN THE SHIP.Claire thought, Yeah, and decided to teach me a little lesson in humility. It was her own fault, though-the physics was simple enough. Orbiting meant that centrifugal acceleration exactly balanced local gravity. Silver Metal Lugger could take 27.6 gravs. The ship was designed to tow ore ma.s.ses a thousand times its own ma.s.s.

Nothing less than carbon-stressed alloys would, though. Leave orbit, hover-and you got crushed into gooey red paste.

She crawled across her living room carpet. Her joints ached. "Got to be-"

SHALL I ABORT THE FLIGHT PLAN?.

"No! There's got to be a way to-"

THREE POINT NINE MINUTES UNTIL ARRIVAL.

The sim's voice radiated malicious glee. Claire grunted, "The water."

I HAVE DIFFICULTY IN PICKING UP YOUR SIGNAL.

"Because this suit is for s.p.a.ce, not diving."

Claire floated over her leather couch. Too bad about all the expensive interior decoration. The entire living complex was filled with her drinking and maintenance water. It had been either that, fast, or be lumpy tomato paste.

She had crawled through a hatchway and pulled her pressure suit down from its clamp lock. Getting it on was a struggle. Being slick with sweat helped but not much. Then she snagged her arm in a sleeve and couldn't pull the d.a.m.ned thing off to try again.

She had nearly panicked then. Pilots don't let their fear eat on them, not while there's flying to be done.

She made herself get the sleeve off one step at a time, ignoring everything else.

And as soon as Erma pumped the water reserve into the rooms, Archimedes's principle had taken over.

With her suit inflated, the water she displaced exactly balanced her own weight. Floating under water was a rare sensation on Mercury or Luna. She had never done it and she had never realized that it was remarkably like being in orbit. Cool, too.

Until you boil like a lobster... she thought uneasily.

Water was a good conductor, four times better than air, you learned that by feel, flying freighters near the Sun. So first she had to let the rest of the ship go to h.e.l.l, refrigerating just the water. Then Erma had to route some of the water into heat exchangers, letting it boil off to protect the rest. Juggling for time.

PUMPS ARE RUNNING HOT NOW. SOME HAVE BEARING FAILURES.

"Not much we can do, is there?"

She was strangely calm now and that made the plain, hard fear in her belly heavy, like a lump. Too many things to think about, all of them bad. The water could short out circuits. And as it boiled away, she had less shielding from the x-rays lancing up from below. Only a matter of time....

WE ARE HOVERING. THE MAGNETIC ANTI-MATTER TRAPS ARE SUPERCONDUCTING,.

AS YOU RECALL. AS TEMPERATURE CONTINUES TO RISE, THEY WILL FAIL.She could still see the wall screens, blurred from the water. "OK, OK. Extend the magnetic grapplers.

Down, into the arch."

I FAIL TO-.

"We're going fishing. Not with a worm-for one."

Tough piloting, though, at the bottom of a swimming pool, Claire thought as she brought the ship down on its roaring pyre.

Even through the water she could feel the vibration. Antimatter annihilated in its reaction chamber at a rate she had never reached before. The ship groaned and strummed. The gravities were bad enough; now thermal expansion of the ship itself was straining every beam and rivet.

She searched downward. Seconds ticked away. Where? Where?

There it was. A dark sphere hung among the magnetic arch strands. Red streamers worked over it.

Violet rays fanned out like bizarre hair, twisting, dancing in tufts along the curvature. A hole into another place.

THE RED AND BLUE SHIFTS ARISE FROM THE INTENSE PSEUDO-GRAVITATIONAL.

FORCES WHICH SUSTAIN IT.

"So theory says. Not something I want to get my hands on."

EXCEPT METAPHORICALLY.

Claire's laugh was jumpy, dry. "No, magnetically."

She ordered Erma to settle the Silver Metal Lugger down into the thicket of magnetic flux tubes.

Vibration picked up, a jittery hum in the deck. Claire swam impatiently from one wall screen to the other, looking from the worm, judging distances. h.e.l.l of a way to fly.

Their jet wash blurred the wormhole's ebony curves. Like a black tennis ball in blue-white surf, it bobbed and tossed on magnetic turbulence. Nothing was falling into it, she could see. Plasma streamers arched along the flux tubes, shying away. The negative curvature repulsed matter-and would shove Silver Metal Lugger's hull away, too.

But magnetic fields have no ma.s.s.

Most people found magnetic forces mysterious, but to pilots and engineers who worked with them, they were just big, strong ribbons that needed shaping. Like rubber bands, they stretched, storing energy-then snapped back when released. Unbreakable, almost.

In routine work, Silver Metal Lugger grabbed enormous ore buckets with those magnetic fingers. The buckets came arcing up from Mercury, flung out by electromagnetic slingshots. Claire's trickiest job was playing catcher, with a magnetic mitt.

Now she had to snag a bucket of warped s.p.a.ce-time. And quick.

WE CANNOT REMAIN HERE LONG. INTERNAL TEMPERATURE RISES AT 19.3 DEGREES.

PER MINUTE.

"That can't be right. I'm still comfortable."BECAUSE I'M ALLOWING WATER TO EVAPORATE, TAKING THE BULK OF THE THERMAL FLUX AWAY.

"Keep an eye on it."

PROBABLE YIELD FROM CAPTURE OF A WORMHOLE, I ESTIMATE, is 2.8 BILLION.

"That'll do the trick. You multiplied the yield in dollars times the odds of success?"

YES. TIMES THE PROBABILITY OF REMAINING ALIVE.

She didn't want to ask what that number was. "Keep us dropping."

Instead, they slowed. The arch's flux tubes pushed upward against the ship. Claire extended the ship's magnetic fields, firing the booster generators, pumping current into the millions of induction loops that circled the hull. Silver Metal Lugger was one big circuit, wired like a slinky toy, coils wrapped around the cylindrical axis.

Gingerly she pulsed it, spilling more antimatter into the chambers. The ship's multipolar fields bulged forth. Feed out the line....

They fought their way down. On her screens she saw magnetic feelers reaching far below their exhaust plumes. Groping.

Claire ordered some fast command changes. Erma switched linkages, interfaced software, all in a twinkling. Good worker, but spotty as a personality sim, Claire thought.

Silver Metal Lugger's fields extended to their maximum. She could now use her suit gloves as modified waldoes-mag gloves. They gave her the feel of the magnetic grapplers. Silky, smooth, field lines slipping and expanding, like rubbery air.

Plasma storms blew by them. She reached down, a sensation like plunging her hands into a stretching, elastic vat. Fingers fumbled for the one jewel in all the dross.

She felt a p.r.i.c.kly nugget. It was like a stone with hair. From experience working the ore buckets, she knew the feel of locked-in magnetic dipoles. The worm had its own magnetic fields. That had snared it here, in the spiderweb arch.

A lashing field whipped at her grip. She lost the black pearl.

In the blazing hot plasma she could not see it.

She reached with rubbery fields, caught nothing.

OUR ANTI-MATTER BOTTLES ARE IN DANGER. THEIR SUPERCONDUCTING MAGNETS.

ARE CLOSE TO GOING CRITICAL. THEY WILL FAIL WITHIN 7.4 MINUTES.

"Let me concentrate! No, wait-Circulate water around them. Buy some time."

BUT THE REMAINING WATER IS IN YOUR QUARTERS.

"This is all that's left?" She peered around at her once-luxurious living room. Counting the bedroom, rec area and kitchen-"How... long?"

UNTIL YOUR WATER BEGINS TO EVAPORATE? ALMOST AN HOUR."But when it evaporates, it's boiling."

TRUE. I AM MERELY TRYING TO REMAIN FACTUAL.

"The emotional stuff's left to me, huh?" She punched in commands on her suit board. In the torpid, warming water her fingers moved like sausages.

She ordered bots out onto the hull to free up some servos that had jammed. They did their job, little boxy bodies lashed by plasma winds. Two blew away.

She reached down again. Searching. Where was the worm?

Wispy flux tubes wrestled along Silver Metal Lugger's hull. Claire peered into a red glare of superheated plasma. Hot, but tenuous. The real enemy was the photon storm streaming up from far below, searing even the silvery hull.

She still had worker-bots on the hull. Four had jets. She popped their anchors free. They plunged, fired jets, and she aimed them downward in a pattern.

"Follow trajectories," she ordered Erma. Orange tracer lines appeared on the screens.

The bots swooped toward their deaths. One flicked to the side, a sharp nudge. "There's the worm! We can't see for all this d.a.m.ned plasma, but it shoved that bot away."

The bots evaporated, sprays of liquid metal. She followed them and grabbed for the worm.

Magnetic field lines groped, probed.

WE HAVE 88 SECONDS REMAINING FOR ANTIMATTER CONFINEMENT.

"Save a reserve!"

YOU HAVE NO PLAN. I DEMAND THAT WE EXECUTE EMERGENCY-.

"OK, save some antimatter. The rest I use-now."

They ploughed downward, shuddering. Her hands fumbled at the wormhole. Now it felt slippery, oily. Its magnetic dipoles were like greasy hair, slick, the bulk beneath jumping away from her grasp as if it were alive.

On her screens she saw the dark globe slide and bounce. The worm wriggled out of her grasp. She snaked inductive fingers around it. Easy, easy.... There. Gotcha.

"I've got a good grip on it. Lemme have that antimatter."

Something like a sigh echoed from Erma. On her ship's operations screen, Claire saw the ship's magnetic vaults begin to discharge. Ruby-red pouches slipped out of magnetic mirror geometries, squirting out through opened gates.

She felt a surge as the ship began to lift. Good, but it wasn't going to last. They were dumping antimatter into the reaction chamber so fast, it didn't have time to find matching particles. The hot jet spurting out below was a mixture of matter and its howling enemy, its polar opposite. This, Claire directed down onto the flux tubes around the hole. Leggo, d.a.m.n it.

She knew an old trick, impossibly slow in ordinary free s.p.a.ce. When you manage to force two magneticfield lines close together, they can reconnect. That liberates some field energy into heat and can even blow open a magnetic structure. The process is slow-unless you jab it with turbulent, rowdy plasma.

The antimatter in their downwash cut straight through flux tubes. Claire carved with her jet, freeing field lines that still snared the worm. The ship rose further, dragging the worm upward.

It's not too heavy, Claire thought. That science officer said they could come in any size at all. This one is just about right for a small ship to slip through-to where?

YOU HAVE REMAINING 11.34 MINUTES COOLING TIME-.

"Here's your hat-" Claire swept the jet wash over a last, large flux tube. It glistened as annihilation energies burst forth like bonfires, raging in a place already hot beyond imagination. Magnetic knots snarled, exploded. "-What's your hurry?"

The solar coronal arch burst open.

She had sensed these potential energies locked in the peak of the arch, an intuition that came through her hands, from long work with the mag gloves. Craftswoman's knowledge: Find the stressed flux lines. Turn the key.

Then all h.e.l.l broke loose.

The acceleration slammed her to the floor, despite the water. Below, she saw the vast vault of energy stored in the arch blow out and up, directly below them.