Chapter 8: Piercing the Void

Vesta 4 Asteroid, Main belt, Sol System

December 16, 3115 (one month later)

I waited in the small exercise and relaxation chamber adjacent to the main working area of Uxe’s former isolated laboratory inside the asteroid Vesta. Ohmu was my only companion as Rami Rahaat, Uxe’s former roommate and lover from when she had resided on this asteroid, had departed ten minutes ago. He had been waiting with us for Uxe’s pending arrival but had been suddenly called back to the asteroid’s main shipyard complex to handle some unforeseen problem that had arisen.

Uxe had been due to arrive on Vesta just about now but her long-ranged wormhole transfer had been delayed slightly while she finished a few last-minute tasks. At least I’d been notified of the delay before I could begin to worry. We now had smaller wormholes dedicated to only communications which provided low-latency linkages across the far-flung inhabited areas of the solar system. This meant that Vesta was now able to access the data nets of Mars and Earth without the light-speed imposed delays of the old radio or microwave relays.

While I waited, I kept myself from fretting by utilizing the room’s micro-gravity exercise equipment doing tethered sit-ups and squats. The elastic tethers were needed as the surface gravity on Vesta was only three percent of Earth’s and also far less than that of the moon which I had left only a few hours ago. I was familiar with this type of equipment and was able to get a good workout.

As I exercised, I let my mind wander. Mostly, I mulled over the recent accomplishments of the project I’d left behind on the moon. It had been a busy three weeks on the Farside Station after I’d returned from my vacation on Earth.

The ongoing work to develop the advanced weaponry needed for our eventual attack on the enemy ark was proceeding at full speed and I’d been put to work doing what I did best which had been penetrating the bureaucracy. Mainly, my duties had involved finding ways to balance conservative safety with the need for rapid progress as demanded by the war effort.

For example, due to the constraints of wormhole technology, every milligram of mass sent through a wormhole had a correlating high energy transmission cost. This cost was orders of magnitude higher if the wormhole terminus needed to be accelerated to fractions of the speed of light needed to match the velocity of the approaching enemy ark ship.

So, if we wanted to place bombs, or even just small probes, stationary to the enemy ark, it would greatly help our energy situation if those bombs or probes were as low-mass as possible. Reducing mass had potentially dangerous ramifications, however.

Consider your basic annihilation bomb where the yield came from simply combining equal masses of matter and antimatter. The antimatter component required a considerable amount of complicated wizardry to keep it contained and secure so as to not explode until you wanted it to. This wizardry was normally heavy, delicate, and complicated.

Unfortunately, it was also the only practical part of the weapon system which could be minimized to save mass. The antimatter couldn’t be reduced as every single atom of it was needed to make the boom. Simply put, less antimatter equaled less boom. So, if you reduced the antimatter your boom simply became that much smaller.

The matter component of the device had to roughly match the antimatter mass. This could come from the other parts of the bomb, the shell of the weapon, and the mass of the control wizardry. Some could even come from the enemy ark itself but only if the contact occurred deep inside it.

So, the only practical way to minimize the mass of a matter-antimatter bomb was to minimize the mass of the containment wizardry. This had the one major drawback of making for a very sensitive and fragile bomb.

Here was where I came in. With a wave of my AI override powers I could enable the testing required to determine just how much reduction in mass and increased fragility we could live with. As you can imagine, these tests failed often and spectacularly. The lunar testing field adjacent to the Farside Station was littered with the new pockmarks of our recent mass-reduction tests.

Was it dangerous? Hell, yes it was! Despite using robots and remotes for as many of the hazardous tests as we could, there were still times when the unforeseen happened. Did anyone die? Sadly, sometimes, yes they did. I’d insisted that every human be fully recorded before each and every major test series and that all workers were volunteers but still, we had losses and each loss weighed on my soul.

Despite the dangers, we made progress. We now had working designs for storable, low-mass, compact antimatter warheads with the smallest being about the size of an old basketball. Inside this peewee bomb was about a kilogram of frozen antihydrogen which when combined with normal matter would make a bang of around forty megatons of old-style Trinitrotoluene or TNT.

We could have made it much, much smaller in physical size if we had not used hydrogen ice. But for what the lightest element lacked in compactness, it made up for by its low mass and ‘ease’ of manufacture. And, when we needed to send them many light-years away through our wormholes, low mass was all that mattered.

We had other weapons in the works and thankfully, most were less risky to handle than antimatter. The simplest weapon was a compact spike of tungsten. They were the utmost in simplicity as all we had to do is use the wormhole to plop them in the path of the enemy ark. We’d send them without matching the ark’s velocity and let the enemy run into them.

As you can expect, the 7.496 % C velocity difference made for a pretty decent bang. The smallest size punji rod we were stockpiling was a bit over one hundred kilograms. This made for an eighty-millimeter diameter rod a bit over a meter and a half long. If we stuck one in the path of the enemy, it would punch with the kinetic energy of around six megatons of TNT yield. We had made hundreds already. Also, not having to match the ark’s speed meant that we would have the wormhole energy to send dozens of the rods at a time.

The one downside was that the kinetic rods would need to be precisely targeted. Because of the enormous rate of closure, the rods would have to be perfectly placed so that the enemy ark would smash into them without our having to guide or maneuver them. This meant we’d need to track both the enemy ark course and speed and our slug’s arrival positions very accurately.

To do so would require stealthy probes which would need to shadow the enemy ark. More things to figure out and build. Adding to the complexity of the rods, we dare not just put the slugs in the direct path of the enemy.

If we tried, and if our timing was off just the smallest amount, we ran the risk of the ark impacting our active wormhole. If that occurred, our massively complex and expensive wormhole generator machinery, and everything nearby, would go up in a gigaton-sized feedback explosion.

No, to prevent that risk, we’d have to deploy our tungsten slugs from off to the side of the arks course vector. It would be like a stationary bow hunter shooting at a deer running by at an angle. Only this ‘deer’ would be flying by at over seven percent of light speed. As I said, there were still a lot of bugs to work out with the plan. I suspect there will be a lot of misses before we get our timing just right.

We also had a few non-explosive and non-kinetic weapons in the works. Some of these were logic-based attacks and ironically, were probably just as dangerous as the delicate antimatter basketballs. The existence of logic-based weapons was being kept very secret for now to prevent widespread panic and worry. Only a handful of trusted humans were working with the AIs on that aspect of our weapons program.

I was brought out of my woolgathering by Neo-Truffles AI announcing that it was finally ready to activate Sarissa, the prototype long-reaching wormhole machine located in the adjacent vacuum chamber and bring Uxe here from Mars. I untethered myself from the low gravity treadmill and pulled myself over to the nearby window which looked out into the enormous experiment chamber beyond.

I’d first seen this chamber two years ago when Uxe had revealed her wormhole discovery to me. The experiment chamber had been modified since then, with the largest change being that the entire space was now open to the stars above. Where before there had been a roof or barrier hiding the work area from anyone passing by overhead, now the chamber resembled an enormous deep crater. But, unlike the normal empty asteroid crater, this one was filled with complicated gadgetry lit by bright spotlighting.

The chamber remained in vacuum to save construction time and to reduce the damage from explosions. Also, without having to pass through tunnels or airlocks, the larger and bulkier items could be brought to the crater from orbit or the main shipyard simply by flying them here and landing them directly into the crater.

Long-range, high spatial differential wormhole transport was also best performed in a vacuum as even transmitting air molecules along with the cargo required additional power. So, for all the reasons given, the Sarissa prototype remained in a vacuum environment.

Ohmu joined me at the window as we watched the huge, complicated wormhole gadget becoming active. The bulky torus-shaped device slowly gimbaled around to align its main transfer vector with that of the target’s spatial vector back in orbit around Mars. A long mobile manipulator arm unfolded itself from the chamber’s perimeter and positioned its catching grapple near the discharge point of the wormhole.

I noted there was a redundant safety net behind the grabber head. This was because the actual transfer would happen quickly to minimize power usage and the net was a backup in case the grabber missed catching the incoming projectile.

I was glad for the net as that projectile would be my former wife and still best friend in her sealed transport tube. I’d gone through the same trip a few hours earlier and I sympathized with what Uxe would soon be experiencing.

Ohmu and I saw the distortion ring form and stabilize. The vacuum beyond the window meant that the wormhole opened mostly in silence. The only non-visual sensation I noted was a vibration in the floor as the huge power coupling relays in the power center below us closed, sending megajoules of energy into the spatial compensators of the wormhole machinery.

I was happy to see that the Sarissa hardware had been built for show and that the compensating coils ringing the main torrid shape of the generator were now showing visual power cycling indicators. As the exotic matter streams inside the rings were accelerated to match the motion of Mars, the lights on the outer casings became a spinning blur until they formed near-steady neon-like rings around the wormhole opening itself.

“Transferring now,” Truffles said audibly using an overhead speaker.

There was a flash and a shiny body-sized cylinder shot out from the wormhole’s distortion ring. The grabber caught the fast-moving projectile, recoiling as it absorbed its velocity. To conserve energy, almost before the grabber stopped moving, the active wormhole was closed. The opening power relays caused a second small tremor in the floor of the room as the massive energy flow was disconnected.

The grabber arm carefully repositioned the cylinder to one of the medium-sized airlocks adjoining the control room. The transfer was over and Uxe had been delivered from Mars orbit to here on Vesta.

Despite the brevity of the procedure, the nearly two AUs of travel and the spatial momentum compensation needed had required around five hundred billion joules of continuous energy input. I’d inquired with Ohmu, who equated the power expended to that of a small backpack nuclear bomb.

At first, I understood that to be a tiny nuclear explosion until Ohmu reminded me that the energy release was not in one instant burst but sustained for almost two seconds. This meant that in actuality it was like a few hundred ‘little’ nukes going off over the few seconds of the transfer. I had a sudden revelation that our new mode of travel would result in a system-wide energy crisis if no one was careful.

Ohmu and I headed to the main operations room adjacent to the habitat to greet Uxe. There we found two humans busy at work in the operations room: Marissa Urbane and Tomas Oppenheim.

Tomas was a science specialist and was overseeing a main control console likely acting as an emergency backup in case Truffles, the main AI in charge, blew a tube. The unlikelihood of that happening, or the slim chance that he would be able to intervene fast enough to matter, was proven by the fact that he was currently reclined back in his chair, off in some virtual amusement.

Marissa was currently busier. The female mechanical technician was standing near the inner door of the airlock where Uxe’s tube had just been delivered, waiting for it to pressurize. Ohmu followed me as I approached the airlock alcove.

“Hey, John,” Marissa said, “Did your exercise session get the jitters worked out of your system?”

“It helped some. I guess the transfer I’d gone through earlier and the big test we have coming up has me feeling a little anxious,” I replied.

She just nodded and turned to watch the lock complete its cycle. I remained silent also. Marissa was friendly enough but she had the annoying habit of constantly popping into and out of virtual. It was not that she was addicted to being online as much as that she was an extremely busy technician and was needed elsewhere.

I had checked her access registry and learned that while she was here assisting with our arrival and the pending test, she was also overseeing a crew of welding bots back at the main shipyard. She wore overlay goggles and I suspected had data feeds running almost constantly requiring her attention and oversight.

Yes, despite the promise of near-term interstellar-range wormholes, the shipyard was still busy working on the Gambado. There had been talk of stopping construction of humanity’s fourth colonizer and exploration starship and shifting resources to the wormhole effort but that had been overruled, at least for now.

In fact, we were busy redesigning and rebuilding the massive starship to take advantage of our recent wormhole breakthroughs. The main modifications being made to Gambado were the inclusion of an onboard interplanetary-range wormhole generator.

This meant that if and when Gambado reached its destination star, the ship would not have to rely on dropships to shuttle equipment to and from any planetary surface. This would reduce the mass of the vessel while saving time once it arrived at its destination.

The airlock’s pressure indicator illuminated and Marissa began opening the big hatch cover. Soon, a metallic sealed transport cylinder was revealed lying on its side on the floor of the lock. To save mass, the compact cylinder had no windows and again I winced in sympathy thinking of Uxe sealed inside the tiny capsule.

Ohmu and Marissa reached into the lock and pulled the tube out into the operations room.

“Get me out of here!” I heard the faint, tinny-sounding voice of Uxe yelling through the thin, metal shell.

Marissa grabbed a power wrench and attacked the fasteners holding the lid on the simple cylinder. Ohmu assisted by stabilizing the tube in Vesta’s microgravity by straddling the cylinder and using her magnetic footpads to hold it secure to the floor. The top-mounted cap finally released with a small puff of equalizing air pressure and Marissa set it aside.

Uxe kicked off the bottom of the tube and shot out of the top like a cork from a bottle. I made the mistake of laughing as she barely managed to catch herself before ramming her head into the bulkhead like a little female-shaped torpedo. I stopped chuckling when she quickly flipped herself upright using the bulkhead’s hand grabs and stood there glaring at me.

She gave a visible shudder and quickly composed herself. “I hate these new lightweight cans you can’t see out of,” she said. “Thank God we only have to be sealed inside for a few minutes.”

Uxe looked much as she did when I had seen her last. She still had the smaller low-gravity shell with the strange, oversized cranium. Her shells’ abnormal head was even more noticeable now, as most of it was shaved bare to allow easy access to the many data ports. What hair remained was cropped short and dyed a sapphire blue. It was quite a look but as this was my friend and former spouse, I kept any negatives about her appearance to myself.

I smiled and pushed myself over to her to give her a big welcoming hug. I felt her still shivering slightly in my arms. She calmed as she hugged me back and we shared a quick kiss.

When we broke apart, she inspected me and gave me an approving smile, “I’ve missed you too, John.”

Ohmu and Marissa replaced the lid on the transfer tube and stowed it in a rack with many other similar cylinders. Uxe and I remained close and held hands as we watched them work. When they had finished, I introduced Uxe to Marissa and Tomas. She shook each of their hands and then gave Ohmu a hug.

“It’s been a while Ohmu. Even though he promised he’d visit, you haven’t managed to get your master to come to Mars to visit,” she said, while giving me a look.

“Yes, I am happy to see you again Uxe. As far as visiting Mars, if today’s test with the Sarissa prototype goes well, we may be visiting you at the Phobos military wormhole complex soon enough,” the android replied.

“Welcome back to Vesta, Uxe,” Truffles AI spoke after Ohmu finished. “I hope your transport from Mars was tolerable?”

“Hello, Truffles. I’m okay and glad to be back. Is everything here ready to go?” Uxe asked the AI.

“All equipment needed for the upcoming operation is optimal. Preparations are complete except for the final downloading of the payload control presence. The asteroid’s primary power storage units are currently charging and will reach maximum capacity in one hundred and twelve minutes. The secondary power facilities are holding on standby status in near orbit,” The research complex’s AI said.

“What’s the status of the new data connection back to the Earth?” Uxe next asked.

“The data-only wormhole link is active and holding. L2 station reports that it expects to have enough power available to maintain the direct data linkage for the next four hours. Using the link, we will have full low-latency contact with both Naomi and Xenius AIs. They will add their capacity to the local asteroid-based AIs, Ganasium, and myself,” Truffles reported.

I had seldom interacted with Xenius. It was the lesser AI devoted to all things related to our ally (we hoped they were an ally!) against the Assemblage, the Hemru. Ganasium AI was responsible for the construction of our interstellar starships and was based in a data center adjacent to the main shipyard.

Truffles was Uxe’s original firewalled wormhole research AI based here at this experimental laboratory in an armored chamber below us. Now that the wormhole tech was no longer secret, the firewalls had been opened and the AI was able to link with the rest of its peers. The AI was heavily involved with the Far Reach project, both here and on Mars, and had been the driver behind the construction of the Sarissa hardware located in the adjacent vacuum chamber.

Naomi was Naomi. It was nice to now remain in contact with my old companion while traveling deeper into the solar system and away from its main processors back on the Earth. With all four AIs available for the upcoming test, we should have more than enough computing power on tap.

“Where is Rami?” Uxe asked.

“He was waiting for you but something came up back at the main shipyard. I don’t think he will have time to return before the upcoming operation,” I explained.

I didn’t have to explain that as a supervisor on the starship’s construction, Rami would be kept away from the prototype during the upcoming operation. Uxe was aware of those security needs better than I was. There is always a chance that a long-distance wormhole would open in the path of a chunk of high velocity space debris and destroy the complex.

The shipyard and the main base are far enough away to be safe from any feedback explosions if that were to occur. Just as with me, Uxe had been required to have a full mind-data backup before being permitted to come here today. All persons attending today’s operations were similarly backed up including Marissa and Tomas.

Tomas accessed his instruments for a moment and then spoke. “Ma’am, the main habitat short-range wormhole is available and has an opening in its schedule if you wish to make a quick visit to the main shipyard control center where supervisor Rahaat is currently working.”

Uxe looked towards me. “We do have over an hour to wait and I’d like to see him. Care to join me for a quick hop over to see Rami?”

“I’ve already spoken with him so you go on ahead. I’ll grab a coffee and a bite to eat from the auto kitchen while you’re gone. I should also check in with my great-granddaughter back on my island while I have the free time,” I replied.

Uxe just smiled. She was smart enough to know that my excuse was a polite fiction to allow her time to visit her old lover and roommate alone. They had been apart for a few years now so it was only fair that they had a moment of privacy.

“Please arrange for the transport Tomas,” she told the specialist.

Fifteen seconds later, a one-meter diameter wormhole appeared at the opposite end of the workroom. Within seconds a short, open-ended metallic tube extruded out from the distortion ring. From the outer edge of the tube, a cone of safety mesh unfurled on long filaments. Due to the extremely low gravity, local wormhole travel on Vesta didn’t require transport cylinders.

“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” Uxe said as she launched herself towards the floating safety netting and reached the handholds lining the inner surface of the narrow tube. I watched amazed as she pulled herself inside and was gone. Ten seconds later the netting and the tube retracted into the distortion ring, and with a quiet ‘pop’, the local wormhole was gone.

“That sure beats riding that old, cramped train back to the center of the asteroid,” I said, mostly to myself. The others heard and nodded their agreement.

Ten minutes later, Ohmu joined me at the break room area while I sipped a bulb of coffee. I was going to skip eating but that plan changed when Ohmu withdrew fresh chocolate chip cookies from the food maker. I pulled two off the stick-tray before the android carried the rest to Marissa and Tomas.

As I munched on the warm treat, I sat entwined in a low-gee body cradle near the exterior window and watched vacuum-capable mobile units crawl around the Sarissa wormhole generator machinery inspecting and readying it for its upcoming first real mission.

Ohmu returned but remained silent as we watched the ongoing work. Although this was normal for the android, I suspected the silence this time was for other reasons.

“If you are worried about the upcoming mission Ohmu, you know that we can send another presence along with the probe. Xenius AI has prepared its own sub-presence to control the probe,” I said quietly.

“No, John. I agree with Naomi that it should be a copy of my presence that is sent. My logical processes have already been optimized for operations in a hardware limited environment. My presence also has the advantage of fully-integrated Hemru override algorithms,” the android replied.

“But you’ve already died once to a Hemru device,” I said, referring to the accident which occurred centuries ago in the hidden Hemru bunker in Sri Lanka. “Are you sure you want to risk a copy to that happening again?”

“Nothing is certain regarding our pending contact with the Hemru probe, John. However, having it self-destruct during our contact has a very low probability of occurring. Regardless, I only risk a copy of my presence. I have already accepted the copy’s loss, regardless.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“No matter the outcome of the contact with the Hemru probe, the physical probe containing the copy of my presence will not be physically returning. Thus, the copy will remain aboard and be lost to the vastness of space for all time regardless of whether or not the Hemru probe self-destructs.”

“Oh,” I said soberly. I hadn’t thought of that until Ohmu brought it up. Due to the high power required for today’s mission, we would not have enough energy reserves to bring our physical probe back home. Oh, I’m sure we could wait a few days or weeks until we stored enough energy, but there was really no point in doing so.

We would remain in intermittent contact with the probe during and after its mission by using a smaller, data-only wormhole link. This would allow Sol system to retrieve all collected data and for the probe to act as a long-duration scout. Still, it meant that Ohmu’s digital copy would remain on the probe. In effect, the android was correct in that it would be consigning a part of itself to a likely eternal drift through space.

My attention returned to the activities in the large crater as a new device was readied. It was a ten-meter-long launching tube. The large gun-barrel-like device would be used to inject three smaller scout probes and our final larger contact probe into the wormhole. The launcher was mounted on the end of a long, telescoping boom which resembled an old construction crane.

I laughed at a sudden thought. Ohmu looked away from the window to wonder at my outburst.

“Sorry, my friend. I just had a weird thought of a man being shot out of a circus cannon,” I said after controlling myself.

“The Great Ohmudini?” the android asked. “Or, maybe Ohmuzelli, the Queen of the Flying Trapeze?”

I snorted. “Maybe we should stick with just Ohmu. Or maybe Ohmutoo, as it will be a copy.”

After I finished my coffee I held to the promise I’d made to Uxe and made two virtual calls back home. The first was to Serenity back on Heels in the Sand. I wanted to both check in and see how things were going and also to warn her that I’d be coming back to the island for another short vacation after the conclusion of the mission here. I planned to invite Uxe along but whether she would join me would depend upon her schedule.

My second virtual communication was with Hannah. I knew given the current time in old Utah that she was probably sleeping but she had been adamant about being kept abreast of any major news regarding our progress with wormhole technology. She took my call and I quickly brought her up to date regarding today’s mission with the Sarissa prototype.

She was pleased to hear the news and wanted an estimate on how our attack plans were coming along. I was still unable to give her a firm timetable on that, including if she would be allowed to participate. She said she understood but was still going to remain living in her combat shell for the time being in case an attack opportunity arose.

After I terminated the call, I sat and considered whether I really wanted to hold to my promise to include her. The logistics would be costly but in the end, I decided to keep my word as a point of honor. We’d deal with the logistics when the time came.

Twenty minutes before the scheduled start time of the mission, Naomi joined in and said that it was time for Ohmu to go prepare the probe. We made our way back to the main control center room just in time to witness the small inter-asteroid wormhole spit Uxe out.

Ohmu caught her before she drifted to the floor and got her stabilized and standing on her feet. She had slightly ruffled hair and a glow about her that made me smirk.

She noticed my expression. “Forget that idea, John! Rami and I just talked. I had to hustle to get in the transport queue as a bunch of people were requesting to use it to get to their battery-powered shelters.”

I chose to believe her. “How’re Rami and the ship coming along?” I asked, still smiling.

“He’s doing well. He’s been busy with the starship, but the modifications are ahead of schedule. Gambado will be ready to launch in less than a decade unless we need to raid its positron fuel cells for the war effort again.”

I didn’t have to consult with the AIs to know that our first priority remained the pending attack on the Assemblage. The ark was still far enough away that we could afford to delay launching Gambado for another decade or two. We still planned to send her off to Groombridge as a hedge against the possibility of our defeat by the Assemblage.

If we ended up defeating that enemy before the ship was launched, we’d have to re-evaluate the entire starship effort. Maybe some other use could be found for the specialized hardware or maybe it would be sent to a closer star better suited for colonization. That decision was still far down the road, though, and I had little direct interest, regardless.