Salvation

“It was just a beacon signal, coming from the fourth planet: Nkya. So we followed protocol and informed Alpha Defense. A robot lander was flown down from orbit, keeping a minimum designated quarantine distance from the source. Once the lander put a portal on the surface, we started sending equipment through.” He pointed at the big circular portal at the end of the egress chamber. “I’ve never set up a base camp so fast. Just about the first thing we sent through was a twelve-person science ranger vehicle. Connexion security drove it and two Alpha Defense officers out to the artifact and came straight back. That was ten days ago. Next thing I know, Alpha Defense has ruled the whole expedition ultra-classified, and I get orders to send a secondary base through. That’s a joke, because it’s actually better than base camp; it even includes its own hospital, for crap’s sake. Some trucks hauled it out to the artifact, and an engineering crew set it up. They only got back yesterday. The preliminary science team left seven days ago, with another convoy of trucks packed with research equipment. Now you guys are here, and I’ve been ordered to give you total priority.”

“Sorry about that,” Loi said.

“Why?” I asked him. “Everyone is doing their job.”

The kid blushed, but had the smarts enough to shut up.

Geovanni took us right up to the five-meter-diameter portal. They don’t come much bigger; it was circular with an elevated metal ramp bridging the rim at the bottom so the cargo trollez could drive over unimpeded. Bundles of thick cables and hoses snaked through to Nkya underneath the ramp. Three sentinel pillars stood on either side, blank ash-gray surfaces concealing the formidable weaponry they contained. God help any alien that tried to come through without Ainsley’s approval.

Not that it would ever come to that. The G8Turings would cut power to the portal in a millisecond if any bug-eyed, tentacled monster even approached the other side.

I stared through the broad circle. It opened directly into a thirty-meter-wide geodesic dome, also stuffed full of supply racks. Two multi-sensor globes on chest-high posts were positioned on either side, letting the G8Turing scan anything that approached.

“This is it,” Geovanni said proudly, sweeping an arm toward the portal. “This is what we do. Welcome to another world.”

“Thanks.” I went up the ramp’s shallow slope after him. I couldn’t help a little flash of unease as I drew level with the portal’s rim. The Nkya base camp was less than a meter away from me now—a single step, as Connexion’s famous first ad said. A step that would span eighty-nine light-years.

Using ordinary Connexion Corp portal doors to walk between the company’s Earth-spanning network of hubs never bothered me. The greatest distance one of those doors covered was trans-oceanic, maybe six thousand kilometers. But…eighty-nine light-years? You couldn’t not be aware of the time and effort it’d taken to cover that awesome gulf.

Long before Kellan Rindstrom demonstrated quantum spatial entanglement at CERN back in 2062, human dreamers had been coming up with semi-realistic plans for starships. There were proposals to mine Jupiter’s atmosphere for helium-3 that could power a town-sized pulse-fusion ship that would scout nearby stars. Country-sized sails a molecule thick that would ride the solar wind out to the constellations. Skyscraper-sized laser cannon that would accelerate smaller lightsails. Antimatter rockets. The Alcubierre drive. Quantum vacuum plasma thrusters…

Kellan Rindstrom’s discovery consigned them all to the history folder marked: “quirky inventions that never made it past the concept study.” When you can connect two separate physical locations via a quantum entanglement portal, so many problems cease to exist.

Even so, starships require a phenomenal amount of thrust to accelerate up to a decent percentage of light speed, and Connexion Corp’s modern designs achieve in excess of eighty percent. Before Rindstrom, that would have required carrying vast amounts of energy and reaction mass on board. Now, all you do is drop a perfectly spherical portal into the sun. Meta-hot plasma slams into that hole at near-relativistic speed. At the same time, the portal’s exit is fixed at the apex of a magnetic cone, which channels the plasma into a rocket exhaust. There is no limit on how much plasma from the sun you can send through, and the starship masses very little—just the portal and its nozzle, guidance units, and a smaller portal communication link to mission control. It can accelerate fast.