Bowl of Heaven

Redwing went through an extensive engineering review with them. Systems, flows, balances, malfunction indices. After hours of work, he was just as stumped as the ship diagnostic systems, which were better engineers than any of them. Nothing seemed wrong, but the ship could do no better. Seeker had performed perfectly in the first few decades, achieving their terminal velocity when the pressure of incoming matter on its ram fields equaled the thrust it got out of hydrogen fusion. They had been losing velocity through tens of light-years — slightly at first, then more.

Crews had tested the obvious explanations. Maybe the interstellar gas was getting too thin, so they weren’t taking in enough hydrogen to drive the fusion zone at max. That idea didn’t pencil out in the detailed numbers. The fusion drive was a souped-up version of magnetic cylinders, each a rotating torus that contained fusing plasma. Boron–proton reactions were the burning meat and potatoes, the protons shoveled in fresh from the ramscoop. The rotating magnetic equilibria held fusing plasma in their bottles, releasing the alpha particles into the nozzle that drove them forward. It had worked steadily now for centuries. It looked fine.

The next crew thought there was too much dust ahead, so perhaps the fusion burn was tamped down. They found an ingenious way to pluck dust samples from their bow shock and measure it carefully. Nothing wrong there, either.

There were more ideas and trials, and now it was getting serious. They had started with plenty of spare supplies, but now it wasn’t going to be enough.

“Our big fat margin of error got … eaten,” Redwing told them.

Seeker would arrive nearly a century late. They might barely squeeze through, if the expected level of leaks and losses did not happen … but nobody wanted to calculate the odds of that. Because they all knew the odds were bad.

* * *

They all slept on their problems, and the next ship-day Cliff was first up. Another revival symptom — insomnia sometimes lasted weeks. Along with that, and no surprise: irritability. The damn noise wasn’t helping. The best solution was to say as little as possible. Meanwhile, his mind churned away at the deeper puzzle of the bowl that hung like a riddle on their optical viewing screens. The image rippled from plasma refraction, but Cliff could make out tantalizing, momentary patches of detail in it.

The world as a bowl, he thought, trying to think of a better term. Flamboyantly artificial. What would choose to live in such a place?

They held a meeting, and then another, without anything new turning up. At the end of another frustrating conversation, Cliff said quietly, “I want Beth revived. We need more minds on this problem, and we’re stalled.”

Redwing pursed his lips briefly and shook his head. “We’d better keep lean.”

“Only if we’re going to just forge on and hope things improve without our doing anything.” Cliff said it in a rush, finally getting out what he and Abduss had agreed upon.

Before Redwing could respond, Abduss chimed in, “I found another slight decrease in our velocity this morning. Nearly a full kilometer per second.”

A long silence, Redwing carefully letting nothing show in his face. The signs of strain in the man had been mounting. Little gestures of frustration, a broken cup, time off by himself, little social talk. The psychers back Earthside had a high opinion of Redwing’s leadership style, but to Cliff the man had seemed to be best at bureaucratic infighting. No managers to game around out here, though.

“So whatever’s wrong, it’s getting worse,” Redwing said.

Nobody answered.

Cliff said carefully, “Beth has piloting and engineering skills, pretty broad.”

Only when the words were out did he recognize the pun. Mayra smiled but said nothing. A pretty broad. And of course, Cliff’s longtime “associate,” as the polite social term had it.

Redwing let a wry smile play on his face for a few seconds. “Okay, let’s warm her up.”

They started Beth’s revival. The protocols were straightforward, but every case had variations. While the slow processes worked in her, they spent another two days looking at the slowdown problem, getting nowhere. The ship was flying hard, hitting molecular cloudlets and, increasingly, vagrant wisps of plasma. “That’s the plume from the jet we see,” Abduss said. “We’re starting to hit the wake.”

Then the ramscoop would need to navigate, and there would be no data to let it know how to work. The artificial intelligences that tirelessly regulated the scoop fields were smarter than mere humans, adjusting the magnetic scoops and reaction rates — but they were also obsessively narrow. The AIs worked as well as they could, making estimates based on many decades of in-flight experience, guessing at causes — but they could not think outside their conceptual box. “Savants of the engine,” Mayra called them. Cliff wondered if she was being ironic.

“Look, we need to make a decision,” Abduss insisted. “Yes?”

“I do, you mean,” Redwing said. He made a cage of his fingers and peered into it. He was pale and drawn, and not all of that came from his recovery from the long sleep. Nobody had slept much.

Cliff said, “Maybe this is a godsend.”

Redwing shot him a questioning glance. “You always had an odd sense of humor.”

They had not gotten along particularly well in staff and crew meetings. Redwing had held out for making all Scientific Personnel de facto crew members, rigidly set in the chain of command. Cliff and others had blocked him. Scientific Personnel had their own, looser command structure that dealt with Redwing only near the top of the pyramid. Cliff was the highest-ranking Scientific Personnel officer awake. Of course, all that procedural detail was decades ago — no, centuries, he reminded himself — but in personal memory, it still loomed as recent.

He tried a warm, reasonable tone. “If we hadn’t been slowed down, we’d be blazing right by this weird thing. No way we could even swing around that star — say, let’s call it Wickramsingh’s Star, eh? With joint discovery rights for all.”

Thin smiles all around. They needed a little levity. Nobody aboard would ever make a buck from interstellar enterprises.… “But now, going slower, maybe we can make a small correction with a pretty fair delta-V, get a closer look at the thing.”

Redwing looked blank. So did the Wickramsinghs.

Cliff said carefully, “It’s artificial. Maybe we can — ”

“Get help?” Redwing’s mouth twisted skeptically. “I admit, that’s a bizarre object, but it’s not our goal to explore passing phenomena along the way. We’re headed for Glory, and that’s it.”

Cliff had thought about this moment for two days. He spread his hands as if making a deal, splitting the difference. “Maybe we can do both.”

Redwing’s face had already settled into the firm-but-confident expression that served him so well back Earthside. Then he paused, puzzled, and almost against his will asked, “How’s that?”

“Say we use the plasma plume from the star. We’re running up into the fringes already. It’s rich in hydrogen, right?” A nod to Abduss and Mayra. “And a lot more ionized than the ordinary interstellar gas we’ve been riding through, scooping up with the magnetic funnels and blowing out the back, all these decades. For a ramscoop motor, this is high-quality input. Let’s use it to pick up some speed.”

A heartbeat went by, two. Cliff thought, Keep it simple, and said, “That jet’s spurting straight out the back of the thing. Let’s fly up it.”

Redwing asked, “Abduss, isn’t that plume moving at relativistic speeds? In the wrong direction? It’d slow us down.”

Was Redwing right? Mayra was nodding. Recklessly, Cliff said, “That could work, too.”

“You make my head hurt,” Redwing said. “What are you on about now?”

“With what we’ve got for consumables, we’re going to arrive dead at Glory. If we can’t speed up, we’ll have to stop for supplies. Here, now. Make orbit around Wickramsingh’s Star. Deal with the natives.”

They stared at him.

Cliff played his next card. “We’re overtaking the star. Every hour makes a velocity change tougher.”

Mayra’s eyes widened, startled — but surely she had thought of this? — and then she nodded.

Redwing wasn’t a man to leap at a suggestion. But he screwed his mouth around, eyes seeking the low, mottled carbon-fiber ceiling, and said, “Let’s do the calculation.”

* * *

That took another day.