Звезда Пандоры

“Aye, sir,” she replied from her own couch. She was serving as his executive officer for the flight, and was very conscious of everyone knowing about their relationship. It made her a stickler for protocol and efficiency, constantly proving to the crew she’d won the position on merit alone. More than one had privately asked Wilson if he could make her ease off the tight-arse routine. From that point of view, he was rather looking forward to the flight ending himself. Freefall really wasn’t everything the spaceflight romantics claimed. More than one of his bruises had been obtained inside their cabin.

The hysradar scan showed they were surrounded by clear space; there was no trace of anything under acceleration. His e-butler opened a channel to the other two scoutships, encrypting the transmission.

“Oscar, what have you got?” he asked.

“Nothing in sight,” the captain of the StAsaph replied. “I guess they’ve stopped sending ships away from their own star. At least in this direction.”

“Looks that way. Antonia, have you got anything?”

“Not a damn thing,” Antonia Clark said from the bridge of the Langharne. “It’s clean out here.”

“All right, we’ll proceed as agreed. Antonia, tag along with us until we’re ten AUs from the old barrier location. Stay in hyperspace and gather as much information as you can. Any hostile activity directed at us or you, and you are to get straight back to the Commonwealth.”

“Understood.” During the mission planning sessions back on Anshun she had spent days arguing that her scoutship should be the one accompanying the Conway, but there was no trace of resentment in her voice now.

“Tu Lee, take us in,” Wilson ordered. “Anna, sensors on passive mode, please.”

“Already switched over, sir.”

Wilson tried not to roll his eyes.

The scoutships closed on Dyson Alpha. Their mission profile was simple enough; Conway and StAsaph were to enter the inner system, scanning for any sign of wormhole activity. If they found one, they were to approach the source, drop out of hyperspace, and attempt to open communications. If there was no sign of the Dyson aliens experimenting with wormholes, they would fly to Alpha Major and try an open communications there.

They were still a quarter of a light-year out from the star when Anna said, “We’re registering quantum fluctuations consistent with wormhole activity.”

“From this far out?” Tunde Sutton queried.

“Yes, whatever they’ve built, it’s goddamn powerful.”

MorningLightMountain began working on the problem as soon as its new Bose memories had revealed the theory and practical application of wormholes. It took just a few hundred immotile units to determine and quantify the fundamental principles, assisted by the Bose memory’s basic knowledge of human physics and mathematics. The equations fitted easily enough into its own understanding of quantum physics, simply extending the knowledge in a fashion it wouldn’t necessarily have thought of for itself. After that came the more challenging task of designing the hardware. Of that, the Bose memories had little information.

After a month, during which over a thousand immotile units had combined to analyze the new problem and several advanced industrial manufacturing areas had been switched to producing components for the project, the first crude wormhole generator was up and running. MorningLightMountain used it to open a small communications linkage to its biggest settlement at the large gas giant. There, MorningLightMountain23,957, which supervised the settlement, was connected directly back into the original immotile group in real-time. Over the next few weeks, a series of small wormholes were opened to MorningLightMountain’s other settlements, joining more and more remote subsidiaries to the main group cluster of immotiles back on the homeworld, meshing them all together into a single gigantic grouping.

At this point, all the spaceship production facilities MorningLightMountain possessed across the star system were switched to manufacturing components for larger wormhole generators. As more and more wormholes were opened, linking planets, moonlets, and distant asteroid settlements, the spaceships became redundant. It dismantled them and incorporated their resources into the new transport system. New power stations were deployed around the sun, vast rotating structures protected by force fields, that siphoned up the energy and transferred it (via wormhole) to the second gas giant where the greatest wormhole of all was being constructed, the one that would reach across interstellar space.