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Iona waited at the airlock for Blue. Or rather, for his avatar. Their main lock was taken by the shuttle hugging the belly of the ship, so there was no choice but to do a floating transfer. Normally this was accomplished by matching one ship’s speed and trajectory to the other so they were stationary relative to one another, then firing a magnetic grapple trailing a safety line across the void between them.
The first was a given, but Blue didn’t bother with the second. Instead he computed the distance and threw his avatar’s unsuited body across the gap with—no surprise—mechanical precision.
“It is nice to finally be on board in person,” Blue said when Iona cycled the lock open. His avatar stepped onto the deck and cocked its head. “I admit I am not as familiar with human expressions as I would like to be, but you seem upset.”
Iona had volunteered for this job because she was afraid anyone else might punch Blue in the face. With an effort, she pushed down her own annoyance. “We’re all frustrated. We’ve been sequestered for six months, told we’re being sent on a suicide mission, and now you say we’re going up against an active threat we might have to wipe out entirely. Oh, and it’s a planet full of alien tech that will probably try to kill us and the repository for the worst things your species ever tried to unleash on the human race. Do you not see how that might cause a little friction?”
Blue was uncharacteristically silent in response. Not that he was a chatterbox under normal circumstances, but in Iona’s experience he rarely hesitated when answering a question.
When he did speak, it didn’t fill her with much confidence that things might take a startling turn toward being awesome. “I think this is a conversation best had as a group. Or at least with your captain.”
Iona stared at him for a few seconds before shrugging and walking away, motioning for Blue to follow.
––––––––
“You’re the reason we were stuck on that base for half a year,” Grant said in a tone so flat and cold it barely sounded like it came from a living person. Iona stood ready to leap between the two of them should he do something everyone would regret later.
“I am,” Blue said. “And it probably saved your life. Had I not interceded with Admiral Goff and required a training schedule of my own creation, she would have sent this ship in blind just to be rid of Iona. You are welcome.”
Blue sat with perfect innocence written on his bland face, but Iona caught the barest hint of sarcasm in the tone. Gods help them when an AI as divorced from humanity learns to be a smart ass.
“We’ll have to take your word on that,” Grant said, leaning back in the ratty chair he refused to replace. The office was too small for the four of them—Crash had wedged herself in a corner and watched silently. Smart move, as far as Iona was concerned. “Since we don’t know shit about what we’re jumping into.”
“Ah,” Blue said. “Yes. About that.” He tilted his head slightly—an affectation meant for the others rather than a necessary part of the data link his ship established with the Seraphim a moment later. “I have just connected with your system and I’m dumping everything I have on the Vault. To summarize what we will encounter at the outset: the planet is in a very slow orbit around the galactic center. Currently and for the next several thousand years it will be inside a dense nebula. I should note that this appears to be an artificially constructed gas cloud, or at least augmented by technology somehow.”
Iona blinked. “How do you know?”
“Because a typical nebula is not dense in the traditional sense,” Blue said. “You would have no trouble seeing through one from a distance. This one is a volume of gas equivalent to a full stellar mass spread over a fairly small area that is bound by something other than loose gravitational forces. It moves with the Vault, but not quite as fast, and it is opaque to the visible spectrum.”
“Fucking wonderful,” Grant said. “What else?”
Blue took no obvious offense at the curt tone. “Gravitational traps of some kind surround the planet to a distance of several light minutes. Possibly farther. Anything utilizing an active gravity drive will activate them if they are within the sensory envelope of whatever device powers the traps. I lost three dozen probes mapping a small slice of the sky there.”
Crash cleared her throat. “When you say gravity traps, what does that mean exactly?”
Here, Blue looked uncomfortable. He even fidgeted. “I am...unsure. The probes I lost reported a complete loss of control over their Slip engines before being pulled toward a spherical region with a sharply increasing gravity curve. All of them were destroyed by what I believe to be gravitational shearing forces not unlike your torpedoes.”
Crash, so hard to impress, looked momentarily like a wide-eyed child. “That’s at least a little awesome, right? I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
“No one has,” Iona said. “That’s kind of the point.”
––––––––
Whatever trickery Blue used to infiltrate the navigation system was now gone, though Iona wouldn’t have minded the job of piloting the ship falling into anyone else’s hands. Krieger’s absence was felt keenly in moments like this. While she could control the ship far more precisely than any human being, he had the experience. The feel for the job. Iona was not so arrogant that she believed her instincts surpassed his, and gut reactions mattered in close quarters flying.
The staging area Blue chose for their jump was more than a hundred light years away from the rendezvous point he had programmed into their computer. It was a nearly barren solar system, just a parent star and a thin scrum of rocky debris orbiting in a band a few AU from the dim white sun.
“Any idea why Blue wants us to wait?” Dex asked as they sat together in his quarters. The room was small by planetary standards, but as it was one of the officer spaces it didn’t induce claustrophobia. “I mean, I know it’s so he can get ready for the mission, I just don’t understand how he needs the time. He was waiting here for us, right? And he’s an AI. How can he not be ready?”
She made a noncommittal grunt which could have been interpreted as wordless agreement. Dex wasn’t bothered; he just needed to vent. She knew the questions were a sign of nerves. It was how he coped with fear. Some people cowered; Dex wondered. He worked over the angles and tried to understand, a habit Iona liked. Knowledge was the perpetual antidote to fear, after all.
There was no great mystery to work out, and Dex knew that. Blue made it clear there were pieces of technology—some of it experimental—they would need to mount on Seraphim or store in the little remaining cargo space they had. And some of it would doubtlessly be either unstable or simply dangerous. The strain of exotic matter that allowed electromagnetic fields to be translated into gravity was in every ship bigger than a single-person escape pod, and even some of those. Yet without the commonplace but still monstrously complicated shielding and containment measures around those nuggets of profoundly weird matter, ships would rip themselves into countless pieces from an uncontrollable gravitational vortex.
Whatever Blue was moving over, she was happy to take the time. There would be a period where she’d be able to go over the tech once it was on the ship. Until then Iona tried not to think about it. In a mission this fraught with peril, what was one more thing that might kill them all?