Firstborn

John shrugged, but he was sweating, edgy. “The operational order is clear. We’ve had no reaction from the Q-bomb to a non-threatening approach, we’ve seen the destruction of a friendly probe, we’ve had no reaction to the exhaust wash. Nobody might get this close again. We have to act.”

“Libby?” Officially the AI was the ship’s executive officer, and, formally, had a say in the decision.

“I concur with Mr. Metternes’s analysis.”

“All right.”

Edna extracted a softscreen from her coverall, unrolled it and spread it out over the console before her. It lit up as it interfaced with the Liberator’s systems, and then flashed red with stern commandments about security. Using a virtual keypad Edna entered her security details, and leaned forward so the screen could scan her retinas and cheek tattoo. The softscreen, satisfied, turned amber.

“Ready for the third pass,” Libby announced.

“Do it.”

Thirty seconds later the A-drive lit up again, and the Liberator became a blazing matchstick hurling itself through space. This time the burn was harder, the acceleration the best part of two G.

Five seconds from closest approach Edna tapped a button on her command softscreen, giving the weapon its final authorization.

The launch of the fusion bomb caused the craft to shudder once more, as if it were nothing but another harmless probe.

With the weapon gone the Liberator sped away. Edna was pressed back in her chair.

Bisesa’s imagination failed her. “How do you trap a four-dimensional object?”

“In a three-dimensional cage,” Ellie said. “Watch this.” She had a pen clipped to her pressure-suit sleeve. She took this, lifted it toward the face of the Eye, and let go.

The pen snapped upward, and stuck to the roof of the chamber.

“What was that?” Myra asked. “Magnetism?”

“Not magnetism. Gravity. If the Eye wasn’t in the way, you could walk around on the ceiling. Upside down! There is a gravitational anomaly wrapped around the Eye, obviously an artifact just as much as the Eye is. In fact I’ve been able to detect structure in there. Patterns, right at the limit of detectability. The structure of the gravitational field itself may contain information…”

Yuri smiled. “This stuff can be rather fun to think about. You see, there are ways in which a two-dimensional creature, living in a watery meniscus, could trap that finger poking through. Wrap a thread around it and pull it tight, so it couldn’t be withdrawn. This gravitational structure must be analogous.”

“Tell me what you think happened here,” Bisesa said.

“We think there were Martians,” Yuri said. “Long ago, back when our ancestors were just smears of purple slime. We don’t know anything about them. But they were noisy enough to attract the attention of the Firstborn.”

“And the Firstborn struck,” Bisesa whispered.

“Yes. But the Martians fought back. They managed this. A gravitational trap. And it caught an Eye. Here it has remained ever since. For eons, I guess.”

“We’ve tried to use your insights, Bisesa,” Ellie said.

“What do you mean?”

“What you reported of Mir, and your journey back from it. You said the Eye functions as a gateway, at least some of the time. Like a wormhole perhaps. So we’ve experimented. We reflected some of the Eye’s own products back into it, using an electromagnet scavenged from a particle accelerator. Like echoing what somebody says to you.”

“You tried sending a signal through the Eye.”

“Not just that.” Ellie grinned. “We got a signal back. A regular pulsing in the decay products. We had it analyzed. Bisesa, it matches the ‘engaged’ tone from a certain archaic model of cell phone.”

“My God. My phone, in the temple. You sent a message to my phone, on Mir!”

Ellie smiled. “It was a significant technical success.”

Myra said, “Why not share this with Earth?”

“Maybe we’ll have to, in the end,” Alexei said tiredly. “But right now, if they found us, they’d probably just haul the Eye back to the UN Plaza in New York as a trophy, and arrest us. We need a more imaginative response.”

“And that’s why I’m here,” Bisesa said.

The acceleration was savage.

Edna and John saw nothing of the detonation, when it came, because all the Liberator’s sensors were shut off or turned aside, the flight deck windows opaque. Pressed back in her couch, fleeing the explosion, Edna was reminded of training simulations she had run of the suicidal missions of Cold War attack pilots, when you were expected to fly your FJ4-B Fury fighter aircraft into enemy territory at three hundred knots, release the nuclear weapon strapped to your belly, and get yourself out of there, trying to outrun a nuclear fireball, forcing the craft up to speeds the designers never intended.

This mission now had something of that feel — even though, paradoxically, she was safer than any of those heroic, doomed 1960s pilots could ever have been. There were no shock waves to outrun in the vacuum of space; nuclear weapons actually did more damage in an atmosphere.

The acceleration cut out suddenly enough to throw Edna forward against her restraints. She heard John grunt. With a clatter of attitude thrusters the ship turned, and the windows cleared.

The fireball from the nuke had already dissipated.

“And the Q-bomb,” John briskly reported, “is unaffected. Apparently unharmed. It hasn’t deviated from its trajectory at all, as far as I can measure.”

“That’s absurd. It isn’t that massive.”

“Apparently something is — well, anchoring it in space more firmly than mere inertia.”

“Edna,” Libby called, “I’m prepared for pass four.”

Edna sighed. There was no point backing down now; if nothing else they had made their hostile intentions absolutely clear to the Q-bomb. “Proceed. Arm the fish.”

Alexei said, “Look, Bisesa — if the Q-bomb is a Firstborn artifact, then we believe that the best way to combat the threat is to use the Firstborn’s own technology against them. This Eye is the only sample of that technology we have. And you may be our only way to un-lock it.”

As the conversation became more purposeful, Bisesa had the sense that something changed about the Eye above her. As if it shifted. Became more watchful. She heard a faint buzz on her comms link, and her suit seemed to shudder, as if buffeted by a breeze. A breeze?

Myra, frowning, tapped her helmet with a gloved hand.

Yuri looked up. “The Eye — oh shit—”

“Thirty seconds,” said Libby.

John said, “You know, there’s no reason why the bomb has to be constrained by the range of action it’s shown so far. It could just swat this damn ship like a fly.”

“So it could,” Edna said calmly. “Check your constraints.”

John reflexively snapped down his pressure suit visor.

“Ready?”

“Fire your damn fish,” John muttered.

Edna tapped her final enable button. The A-drive cut in, and acceleration bit once more, driving them in their heavy suits back into their couches.

Four torpedoes were fired in a single broadside from cannon mounted on the Liberator’s hull. They were antimatter torpedoes, so unstable they had to be armed with their H-bar pellets in flight, rather than back in dry dock.