Richard Wadholm
Here’s a compelling hard-science adventure, almost extravagantly inventive, that takes us to a strange, complex, and impressively imagined high-tech future, for a compelling tale of disaster, betrayal, and revenge, old things that never change, no matter how much everything else may … .
New writer Richard Wadholm has only made two sales to date, both in 1999, both to Asimov’s Science Fiction, but both of them have clearly marked him as a strong new talent, and as a Writer To Watch in the new century ahead. A graduate of the 1997 Clarion West, he lives in California.
Friend Beltran, this moment has weighed on me for the past six days. At last we meet.
Will you take tea with me? Not to worry, I am not here to poison you with tainted tea. Not from a beautiful service like this, certainly. This tea kettle is pewter, yes? And the brew pot—terra cotta, in the manner of the great smuggling mandarins of the Blanco Grande? Quite so. I must beg your indulgence for its use. I was very thirsty; I have come a long way to see you.
Perhaps my name escapes you. That is the way in this profession we share. Say that I am your delivery man. Indeed, the item you procured at such dear cost is close to hand.
My fee? Whatever you arranged with the navigator Galvan will suffice. A cup of tea from this excellent terra cotta pot would do nicely. And, if you are not too pressed, the answer to a simple question?
Who was it for, the thing you berthed on our ship? Was it for the mercenaries on Michele D’avinet? Or for the Chinese smugglers who used the glare of D’avinet to hide their passing?
I suppose it doesn’t matter much either way. Whoever your treasure was intended for, they were someone’s enemy, but they were no enemy of Beltran Seynoso’s, yes? And we, the crew of the Hierophant, we were merely witnesses. Our only offense was that we could connect you with the destruction of a little star in the outer reaches of Orion.
I wronged you, my friend. You are indeed a man of pitiless resolve. Sitting here,
making tea in your kitchen, in this rambling manse, on this pretty little moon of yours, I underestimated you. I pictured a dilettante, playing at a rough game.
Forgive, forgive.
That story you told our captain, that you represented an Anglo syndicate dealing in – what was it? April pork bellies? We took that for naïveté. No one goes from trading in April pork bellies to dealing in Tuesday morning perbladium. Not even the Anglos.
And then there was that improbable load you hired us to turn.
Do you recall the terms of our arrangement, on the floor of the Bright Matter Exchange in Santa Buenaventura? Our contract called for 1200 pennyweight of perbladium to be bombarded by heavy tungsten ions for 14 hours. The result was supposed to be equal amounts of morghium 414 and commercial grade protactinium.
You recall? Morghium 414! Los Abuelitos! Hardly fitting for a ship like the Hierophant. Once we might have passed on such paltry fare. Indeed, Mateo Diaz, the captain of the Hierophant, laughed as we took your load into space. We in the vane crews laughed as we loaded your job into our targeting shelves.
Why would somebody pay for the use of the starboard vane—always the hot vane on any ship—to turn a mild-mannered little isotope used only by metallurgists? Captain Diaz took you for some sort of cerezadito, just starting out in the commodities market.
Oh, you are very good, Senor Seynoso. My compliments.
Not all of us were fooled. I had a friend, a very dear friend, on the Hierophant’s nuclear chemistry committee. She doubted the decay chain you provided us even before we committed your load to space.
She led me along the chain of isotopes as you had outlined the order of their appearance. Perbladium 462 would indeed transmutate to morghium and protactinium, but only under very idealized circumstances.
Her calculations said your load would turn to unmarketably small amounts of junk isotopes. She was afraid you didn’t know what you were doing.
She need not have worried on that score. Between you and our ship’s high-speed navigator – whose services you cheaply bought – you knew precisely what you were doing.
No, don’t apologize. I am congratulating you: Well played, Sir.
I was chief to the crew that packed the target material for your load. I spent ten hours with it, hauling it out to its own special quadrant of the starboard vane, injecting it into a section of lead and boron-lined target ampoules; sealing each dram over with paraffin, to control the speed of the particles bombarding your treasure.
If anyone should have known what you were doing, it should have been me, yes? I was the perfect foil. Like all cuckolds, my confidence in my own ability was paramount.
We came in off the starboard vane after we finished and Esteban Contreras asked my opinion about piggy-backing a load of thaogol around this benign little load of morghium.
Esteban had already talked to the nuclear chemistry committee, and they had all given their approval. All except for my friend, Frances Cruz. She had doubts.
But I knew Frances very well. I knew she was a cautious person. Cautious, quiet, thoughtful. I added up my cut for anything Contreras sold in Buenaventura. I told him to go ahead with his scheme.
You see, my friend? I am in no position to cast blame; you and I share responsibility for everything that followed.
Unfortunate that Contreras himself can’t be here to speak with you. He had a great belief in the catalytic power of sheer human Will. You and your remorseless skill would have proven something to him that he dearly wished to believe in.
But Esteban Contreras and his Hot Shots were out on the vane, loading their thaogol targets, when your jewel took its first turn.
I was up in the bridge tower, what we in the fleet call the Heidelburgh Tun. I had my eye on a wall full of particle detectors, waiting for a sign of disaster. In this way, Contreras and I had watched out for each other since our cerezadito days.
But disaster is supposed to announce itself in neutron showers, or gamma rays, or a huge heat ramp. The first warning your treasure gave me was nothing more than the burr of a pencil on my desktop.
Few would take notice of such a trifle. Only a lifetime among the big ships of the fleet Buenaventura teaches one to see the signs and read them for what they are: Some vibration had passed through the ship from dorsal to keel, touching every little tea cup and paper clip on its way. It was the subtle harmonic of a nuclear excursion.
I opened a channel to Contreras. I called to him to get off the vane. Contreras had just time to call my name, and then …
Are you listening, friend Beltran? Do you hear them?
You must not shy away now. We are hard men, you and I. We take what we want and we do not flinch from the sad and human business of dying. The young mother who will never see her sons grow up – unfortunate, we say. Business is business. The youth who prays to his patron saint to end his suffering – we reckon this heart-breaking. The old veteran who growls her agony through clenched teeth – tragic and heroic.
Would that it were unnecessary.
Steady-on, friend Beltran. Tears and remorse won’t bring them back now, will they? And we have far to go.
I was with Captain Diaz as he searched for the source of the screams. I studied the particle detectors as half the starboard vane crumbled under the weight of some unknown force. And then the monitors and detectors themselves began to go, one by one all across the starboard vane, like votives being snuffed out by a choir boy. In a moment, Captain Diaz and I found ourselves in silence and darkness.
Were the Hot Shots all dead? Had some of them made their way into the
compartments underneath the starboard vane? Maybe they were out there still, burning to death in some tight space, waiting for us to come for them.
We have all thought about being in that place, Senor Seynoso. Do you see?
We have all seen compañeros walk out of anaerobic fires, their skin cauterized to the inside of their hotsuits. We have all fetched water for someone so burned they could feel nothing but the unquenchable thirst. We do not leave people behind to die that way.
The monitors told a horrendous tale – Spot temperatures were above 2,000 Kelvins, 130 Tesla magnetic fields had buckled 100 ton deck plates all across the dorsal- and ventral-side vanes.
My crew could have stayed in the ship. They had spent ten hours on the vane, and were not scheduled to go out again for another two shifts. No one would have said a word to them.
I made this clear when I explained the situation. Without a word, my mates returned to their armorers and prepared themselves. You should have seen them, those people who died for you. Hard as money, my crew. Hard as coin.
Our good trust rested with Katherine Pope, an Anglo from one of the little worlds along the French Violet. She specialized in “action at a distance.” She had a microwave torch with a collimated radar sight. Normal times, we called upon her to burn small portions of hot metal into gas, for spectrographic analysis at a safe remove. On rare occasions, we called upon her to melt hot metal out of its critical configuration.
You might not have cared for Pope, had you met her. Pope had the temperament of an artist, the arrogance of a diva in a chorus line. We always seemed to be distracting her from something more important. Yet all who knew her work bore her high-handed ways.
Mister Robinson was my second. He ran the crew of false men who interceded for us in the tight spaces. He was a taciturn and disapproving man. Not easy to be around always, but we had been together twelve years and I never doubted my back when he was near.
He had two assistants with him. The more experienced was a young aesthete named Pablo Sanoro. Pablo was the son of Luz Sanoro, the wet dock contractor. He held the splendid air of a young noble working out his summer in some Arcadian vineyard. He was ever gracious and kind. He made a point of joking and chatting up the older man. This always led to his rebuke.
Pablo’s charms were not entirely lost. Mister Robinson had taken on an apprentice as we shipped out of Buenaventura. Rosalie Nunez was a cerezadita from mechanics school, brought in to replace Eduardo Callé, who had died of burns the previous week. Mister Robinson intimidated her, as I suspect he did Pablo and most people. But she was determined to make her place on our crew, and so she stood up to his sarcasm and silent moods. Pablo Sanoro had cheered her on.
One other person is most relevant to this history. But for Frances Cruz, I might have foregone the trip out to this sleepy little plantation of yours.
She was our liaison with the nuclear chemistry group, a serious young woman, who loved jokes, but never knew how to tell any of her own.
She did not seem fretful as we prepared to go out. She was gay and easy. She kidded with my crew, and gave a sisterly hug to Mister Robinson’s new mechanic. She was, in short, completely unlike herself.
I took her aside as the others spread on their electrolytic salves and locked themselves into their armor. I asked her what was wrong. She handed me the spectrographs taken from the burning shelf on the starboard vane.
It was not completely blank, of course. There were lines of titanium and iron from the burning deck, carbon from the diamond superstructure, sodium from burst-open coolant pipes.
All the things one expects in a ship-board catastrophe, save one –
What exactly was burning?
Frances had an idea. She showed me a photograph of the sky above the starboard vane. I didn’t know what I was looking at until she drew an imaginary ring. Outside the ring, the stars shone plain and hard, as always. Inside they burned fat and over-bright.
“Gravitational lensing,” she explained.
I tried to think of something that could bend light waves so hard. “Are you talking about a black hole?” I asked her. “Some sort of gravitational singularity?”
She shook her head at this. “Not a black hole. A black hole would have killed us quick. Whatever is out there seems intent on killing us slowly.”
“So, not a black hole. But something dense enough to bend light.”
“I can’t tell you more; I’m guessing as it is.” She bit her lower lip in a way I had come to know very well. “Here,” she said. “In case you get a bruise.” She put something in my hand and fled the armory.
It was her ritual of good fortune to give me a child’s adhesive bandage as I went out on the vane—her way of telling me to be careful. On this day, she pressed something larger into my hand. I still have it with me, you see?
A box of bandages.
You grow uneasy, my friend.
Perhaps you are anxious for this tea water to boil? I believe tea has to be prepared as the Chinese drink it, which is to say, scalding. I was taught this by an old smuggler up in the Blanco Grande.
Frances used to worry all this boiling water would do some grievous injury to my throat. She was not the appreciator of fine teas that you and I are. Her tastes ran to the simple and the sweet, I’m afraid.
Sometimes I wonder what brought us together. Perhaps I saw something a bit reckless in her, I don’t know. I laugh to think what Frances imagined she saw in me. A man of decency beneath the rage? A man of honesty beneath the lies, compassion beneath the avarice?
You will find this most amusing – because I could not bear to let her down, I would have been that man. I can hardly bring myself to admit it now. Had things
turned out otherwise, Frances and I would be on a little plantation like this one. I would be sitting out on that veranda, a happy fool rocking children to sleep in my lap.
You spared me this embarrassing decline, you and your undertaking. I will not forget that, my friend. You have my word.
I placed Frances’ talisman into my forearm kit as we loaded our gear and false men onto a little cargo train that ran across the starboard vane.
We set out through the tiny valleys of production grade isotopes that clustered on every side of the ship’s hull. Our way into battle was lighted by tubes of flawless manufactured diamond, filled with target isotopes of cesium and cobalt in a liquid suspension. El Camino Azul, we called it – “the Blue Highway.”
The Blue Highway zigzagged past railheads and loading cranes, all untouched by the catastrophe just beyond our sight. The scene was oddly quiet. The rail line was intact here. The screams had stopped. Rosalie Nuñez suggested that things were not so bad. Might Contreras and his Hot Shots have found a place of refuge?
No one dared answer; to acknowledge such baseless hope invited bad luck. Yet her optimism hung in the air as we entered a small canyon filled with low-level actinides.
It was here that the landscape began to deform under the compulsion of your treasure.
A rack of headlights glared at us from the back of the canyon. Pablo Sanoro pointed. “A tractor!” he cried. “It’s the Hot Shots!” He gave Nuñez an encouraging nudge. “Maybe things really aren’t so bad.”
He called out to them and waved. The headlights did not move. We came around to the back of the strontium shelves; Mister Robinson switched on a spotlight.
All the hopeful chatter died away. Someone swore. Pablo Sanoro started to shush the blasphemer, till he realized it was Nuñez herself.
The headlights did indeed belong to a tractor. Perhaps it was the Hot Shots’ tractor. I could not say from looking. The machine had been squeezed into the open end of an abandoned sodium reservoir.
Press your thoughts, friend Beltran – twenty-five tons of steel and titanium tucked into a crevice the size of a baby’s coffin. Here was a missive from your beast, a foretaste of what awaited us.
A silence fell upon my crew as we rolled past the collapsed tractor. Then Pope and Robinson fell into wagering over the nature of a creature that could crush a twenty-five-ton tractor into a sodium conduit.
“Echnesium!” declared Pope. “It radiated mediating particles for the electroweak force. I’ve seen echnesium sweep a vane with riptides of magnetic force, drawing in everything in its wake – ferrous and non-ferrous metals alike. Molten steel, hundreds of degrees beyond the currie point of iron. Lead. Flesh, even.”
Mister Robinson looked at me to see if I was hearing this. “Echnesium has earned its place among the Seven Dreads, but how can echnesium isolate its fury so fine as to suck a tractor into a coolant pipe?”
“I’ve seen echnesium focus its rage finer than that,” Pope declared. She recounted
the tale of a cerezadito she had known on the Ten of Swords. The lad favored a steel mustache bangle. He wore it the day he walked into an echnesium fire, and gave not a thought to steel’s magnetic properties.
“I found him during the next shift,” Pope said, “with his face pressed to a ferroceramic bulkhead, and his ornament working its way out of his left ear.”
Nuñez gasped. Robinson waved his hand, unimpressed.
“Easy to push a little metal through a kid’s brain,” he said. “It’s something else to stuff a tractor into a coolant pipe.”
Pablo Sanoro appealed to all of us for decorum. He nodded toward Nunez, who sat quiet and awe-struck at the back of the train.
Pope raised her chin at Mister Robinson. “If it’s not echnesium, then what?”
“A quantum vacuum state,” Robinson said. “Bound inside the heavy nuclei of some metallic plasma. Vacuum3, perhaps,” Robinson suggested. “Bound inside one of the more stable isotopes of pterachnium.”
Nuñez gave me an uneasy look. Perhaps she longed for reassurance. But I had my mind on Contreras and his Hot Shots, and where I feared they might be. One of the false men ended up explaining the concept of quantum vacuum states for her.
“What we call ‘vacuum’ in this universe is actually a morass of self-annihilating virtual particle pairs. They pop into existence, find each other, and pop out of existence in a suicidal frenzy. But more perfect states of vacuum are possible, and they adhere to their own laws and start-up values. Vacuum3, for instance, allows a small portion of these virtual particles to pop into existence unpaired with any anti-particle to annihilate. Left over, these begin to accumulate.”
Pope nudged at Robinson – where did you pick this one up?
“Do you know how much mass you’re talking about?” she asked. “Sixteen nanoseconds, the mass of these particles would sink an astronomical chunk of space into a singularity.”
The false man – we called him El Guapo, “the Handsome One,” straightened in a show of dignity. “Actually, many of these exotic states radiate the particles as fast they appear.” It knew she was laughing at it. It turned about, looking for allies. “Really, I would have thought someone in your profession would find this more relevant.”
Nuñez looked around at all of us. “What does that mean? We might be facing a black hole?”
“It’s probably a bit of plutonium, burning itself off,” I said.
“Vacuum4 more likely,” said Robinson, who did not stint on the truth in unpleasant matters. “What do you say, Mister Seguro? Vacuum4 radiates magnetic monopoles. That would explain the tractor in the coolant pipe.”
“You have monopoles between your ears,” Pope derided him.
“Monopoles catalyze proton decay. And that, in turn –”
“We’re getting carried away here,” I said. “We don’t know what’s at the back of the vane till we see it for ourselves.”
Pope nodded at me. “What about you? I recall a time you could have told us what we faced without a second thought.”
I looked into the eyes of Nuñez, round with terror. Even Sanoro looked abashed.
“Perhaps my powers are slipping,” I said. “We’ve got enough to think about right here.”
And we did. While we had argued over the precise nature of your treasure, the rail line had angled into a tunnel and brought us down to the region of the undervane.
No mechanic likes the undervane at a time like this. Ask a sailor on the ocean the last place he wants to be when his ship is rolling hard – few things play worse on the mind than being trapped below decks in a foundering ship.
And yet, if Esteban Contreras lived, this is where heat and radiation would have pursued him, to the last place any sane person would go.
We entered a dim and smoldering realm. All mechanical illumination was gone. The vast twilight between us and the distant perimeter of the starboard vane was a grotto of cherry red stalactites, flaming gases, red rivers of steel, glowing like dogs’ eyes at dusk.
We called out for Contreras on our suit radios. Nothing came back but the hoarse roar of static. We waited, called out again. There was no response. We searched for some sign of the Hot Shots on every part of the spectrum. Nothing lay before us but a flood plain of magma, flowing down from the inferno at the back of the vane.
“We need a vantage point,” Mister Robinson said. I found a raised siding. Before the excursion, it had connected the hot vaults at the bottom of the undervane to a quadrant of target shelves on the deck. A giant airlock sealed the two worlds off from each other. But ferocious heat had warped the bulkhead till it was frozen in its track. The rail line leading up to it was washed over. A torrent of metal sludge and debris had formed a natural waterfall from the mouth of the tunnel, across the tracks, over the edge of the siding and into the dark.
Here, we listened for some sign of the Hot Shots.
In the tenuous atmosphere venting from a thousand coolant pipes the ship banged and ticked all around us. We heard no human sound. I slammed on the rail with a target shelf key. Big as a man’s leg, they are. Anyone alive down here would have felt a tremor pass through the deck.
Nothing came back to us but the groans of super-heated metal.
As we waited for some sign from Contreras, a breach opened in the sullen darkness to our left. Molten steel, the remains of one of the giant cracking stations on the surface, poured across the rail line just behind us.
The rear car was swamped before we realized what had happened. It carried all but one of Mister Robinson’s false men. The motor car, where we sat, was engulfed up to the gunwales. Heat exploded up through the floor.
We were hard against it, compañero. The train began to lurch backward in a series of uneven jerks as the brakes gave way to the heat. Someone pleaded with me to call back to the ship for help.
“No one is coming after us,” I said. “That’s how ships lose two or three crews to a single disaster.”
“But we’ll die –”
“Shut up,” I said. I needed to think.
Whoever it was, they started to argue. Without preamble, Mister Robinson threw them over the side. Surprise – the whiner turned out to be the Handsome One. Programmed to human emotion not wisely but too well.
A silence descended on the crew. It lasted for a moment, but one moment was all I needed.
The whistle of escaping gas led my gaze to a small aperture to one side of the airlock. Stars glimmered beyond the hole.
It was far too tiny to squeeze through in a hotsuit, but it implied hope; perhaps the lock was not jammed so tight as it looked.
We had a vane mule locked against the front of the train. The mule was roughly the size and shape of an elevator car, with eight nimble legs per side. Folded against its roof was a telescoping lift, used for reaching the upper levels of the tallest target shelves. Pope and I rode it up to the head waters of the half-molten waterfall. Here, the gases whined and whistled as they squeezed through the tiny orifice.
Pope heated the area with her microwave torch. I wedged an extensible forge into the softened wound and applied pressure.
The metal resisted. I put my shoulder into it, and the hole tore wide open. Our lift kicked away to the right. Pope swore and hung on. I fell, hit the torrent right at its crest.
The surface was covered over with metal garbage. It was smooth and hard beneath. I had nothing to hold on to. Below me waited a golden-hot pool of metal. I clawed for a finger-hold, latched onto something firm. Debris skittered and kicked over me like a wave, but I clung to my handhold till I could lever myself up onto the track.
It was only as I caught my breath before the freshly opened tunnel that I realized what had lent me purchase.
A gloved hand rose out of the welt of metal, as if reaching for a lifeline.
My fellows were silent. I heard someone sob. I thought it was Nuñez, but she was directly behind me, wide-eyed with amazement.
Who was the mechanic enveloped in the metal tomb? I will never know. The crew gathered round to touch the hand, to hold it before moving on.
The train was useless, of course; the track ended here. We piled our gear into the mule’s insulated storage bay. We followed behind as it picked its slow path out of the undervane.
I found myself on the shore of a metallic sea. I confess to you, my friend, my emotions overcame me as I took in the new world your treasure had wrought. Where were the screen control towers that reared up around us like a garden of roses? Where were the centrifuge stations, three stories tall and squat as Sultans? Or the hectares of target shelves that rolled out to the edge of the vane? Or the intricate rail lines that tended them?
Before us lay a ghostly beach town of outbuildings, target shelves, and wrecked
coolant pipe, all twisted and broken open to the sky. I could pick out individual structures with a moment’s concentration. Some of them still had paint on their walls.
Through the gaping doors and windows of a gutted isotope vault, I could see bits of stuff bobbing in the fused metal troughs and waves. Beyond that, the heat had been too intense to leave any trace of history. The topology smoothed into gently rising swells.
The very back of the vane disappeared in a furious glare. Your financial instrument converted everything it touched – ship’s decking and incoming nuclei alike—into a stream of X-rays that swept the sky before us.
We would have died but for the polarizing screens. Mutated as they were, the polarizing screens held focus on the burning shelf at the back of the vane. They scoured the bulk of the heat into space.
Far overhead, the corona of your beast burned at 10 million Kelvins. Observatories around the Orion Nebula thought us a new stellar X-ray source. Did you know?
We huddled in shadow of the vault, with our radiators fully unfurled, like butterflies cowering before a typhoon. I poked a hand-held camera through a sagging tear in the wall and sent pictures back to the nuclear chemistry committee.
Some on the committee thought we were saved. A shower of undifferentiated particles would poison the reactions going on before us. Your treasure would gutter out like a candle in a stream of piss.
The captain himself pointed to the star chart over his desk. The Hierophant plowed through the deepest portion of the Scatterhead Nebula. Clouds of ionized tungsten stretched before us all the way to the Hercules Vent. They would gorge the monster till it erupted into some new state.
“We have to know what’s out there,” the captain said. “Some of us think we’ve created some sort of exotic vacuum state. We can’t tell; at least two of the polarizing screens are intersecting the deck, carrying tell-tale radiation away into space. We need a radio assay from beyond that curtain of plasma.”
“We are already too close to the inferno,” I said. “Any closer, some of us will die.”
Captain was a decent and humble man. He knew very well what he asked of us. He was silent for a moment, and I could almost hear his mind racing for some way out of this terrible command.
“We have to know what’s out there,” he repeated. “Or all of us will die.”
Lend your best attention, my friend; this is how men and women face desperate fate.
There was no drawing of lots, no heroic pronouncements, no brave jokes. Mister Robinson handed the sensor spike to his man Pablo Sanoro. I pointed at a spot overlooking the edge of the pit.
No one offered to take young Pablo’s spot. Death in this place is not so easily eluded that a courageous gesture will save one or doom another.
Perhaps the young one, Nuñez – perhaps she was shocked by this. Sanoro gave her a glance as he stepped out into the light. She raised her gloved hand to him but said nothing. There was no time for fond wishes of luck.
Sanoro shouldered his way forward to an outcropping of metal. He paused a moment to gauge his chances and then he staggered on till he disappeared into the light.
An interval of silence. The remote viewer in my hand blazed with sudden light. We gathered around as it showed us the face that leered from behind its veil of plasma. Nuñez called out to Sanoro to hurry back. Before he could answer, a perturbation among the screens raised a tsunami wave of light high over our heads. A dozen detectors crackled inside my helmet and then subsided. I heard something very faint and far away – a cry of agony?
We, all of us, called out for Sanoro. Rosalie Nuñez called his name. Even you, compañero, would weep to hear her voice. And I know you for the hard man you are. Sanoro never answered. Perhaps the radio interference was too dense. Perhaps he turned off his radio so we would not hear him as he died.
Even now, my thoughts turn to young Nuñez. We might have eased her broken heart, but time was hard upon us. On a dozen tiny screens leered the monster that took Sanoro’s life.
No, no – you must not turn aside now, my friend. This is the sight you paid to see. This is the source of all that had happened. The molten metal that poured through the undervane flowed from here. The circles of destruction that engulfed the starboard vane radiated from this point.
On collimated radar it was a chimera. It roiled and turned about itself like a snake on a hot spit. Infrared showed scabs of magnetic convection crusted over wounds that bled light. All very pretty, but none of it described the engine that drove this conflagration.
We had one last thing to try. Almost as an afterthought, Sanoro had left a gravitational wave interferometer at the brink of the inferno – bricks of purest rubidium, tautly held in a wire harness. It was telling us something even as we dialed it in, but gravitation is a hard thing to gauge on a ship like the Hierophant.
At first, the oscillating line was wildly erratic. As we filtered out the effects of the ship’s velocity, the inertial sink, the polarizing screens, the oscilloscope settled into a metronomic pattern, at once familiar and dreadful.
The thing radiated gravitational waves.
We were all of us silent a long moment. I think we all knew what we saw, but no one wanted to say the words.
Of course, you know what we saw, don’t you. Here is your treasure, compañero. Here is the pearl beyond price.
Vacuum3. Pterachnium.
– The Blue Angel.
Did you know what you were building when you perfected your scheme? Did you fathom the fundamental forces you brought to bear? Indeed, did you think of anything beyond this little moon? These sun-dappled orchards? Those fearsome paladins who guard your sleep?
Pterachnium is not a baryon emitter, like the fissionable actinides. It does not betray itself in high-energy photons, as do the other metallic plasmas. Pterachnium nuclei have only one use to men like you – they are the vessels of choice for binding exotic vacuum states.
I speak of energies at which the quantum vacuum itself trembles on the verge of fluctuation. In the twentieth century, such a fluctuation was credited with the creation of the universe. Cosmologists presumed another fluctuation, if it ever really happened, would sweep across the heavens at light speed, plowing all the rules of Nature in its wake.
Those worthies never counted on ingenious fellows like yourself, creating industrial grades of more- and less-perfect quantum vacuum states—bottling up the lightning of the universe behind an event horizon, like amethyst encrusting the gut of a fire egg.
As I said, mi compañero, you are a clever fellow.
I could tell you the names of ships killed by pterachnium. You would be awe-struck to hear their fates – the Queen of Wands, burned by X-rays with all hands in the Venturi Thermals; the Ace of Cups, shattered by proton decay; the Tower, stripped of its screens at relativistic speeds.
Have you ever seen a ship stripped of its screens at light speed? The leading edge of every span, every deck plate, is pitted and torn as if pecked away by ferocious birds. Sometimes salvage crews find tellolites laying about—tiny deposits of matter left by the energy of particles interacting with the deck (energy, you see, converts to matter, if the exchange is great enough).
At these energies, one’s problems are quickly over. Make no mistake, my friend, I speak of a hard end. But at least there are no lingering deaths from burns or radiation sickness. Certainly, Fate can be more unkind.
Exotic vacuum states are infamous for the electrical potential that attends them. Under the deforming compulsion of these fields, a ship’s polarizing screens begin to cycle, like wire coiled around a giant dynamo. Charged particles slip between cycling screens and the metal deck. Potential builds to discharge.
If you imagine some display of lightning, your vision is too modest. Scale your thoughts up by a factor of a million – electrical discharge on this scale powers the jet streams of exotic stellar objects.
I boarded a ship once, destroyed by successive discharges of 100 terawatts. I will never forget the smell in the mechanics’ armory. It was sweet, you know? Like smoked meat … .
No, no, no. Forgive these morbid thoughts, my friend. These things are none of your concern. I merely wish to lend you understanding of our desperate state of mind as we realized the poisoned cargo you had bequeathed us.
Our screens were infected. Our false men were gone. Pope said she could burn the heart from your monster and we gratefully accepted her word. Indeed, I had seen her look into the blue-hot glare off a burning lump of plutonium and split it in two from five hundred meters.
But plutonium was not so fierce as your treasure. We could study plutonium through our leaded face shields. Pope figured to lose her eyesight. I told her she was being ridiculous.
We had an elaborate sensor array in the mule’s equipment bay—gamma ray imaging, magnetic resonance, collimated radar. I made sure she had the entire spectrum at her disposal. Nuñez stood in the bay and handed out each piece of equipment. I tested each scope and monitor and staked it into the deck.
But I was the ridiculous one. At some point, Pope would grow frustrated with her prosthetic eyes. She and I both knew this. She would look away into the inferno with her own eyes and press the trigger even as her retinas went forever dark. She did not complain about this. She asked only that she be informed how her aim fared—demanded would be a better word.
“You tell me if I miss,” she said. “I’ll put one in right next to it. I won’t need my eyes for that. If you let me take the gun sights off the target, I won’t be able to sight in again. All our deaths will hang on your head.”
Such gentle persuasion. How could I refuse?
In the midst of our preparations, something caused me to look up, some change in the light maybe, I don’t know.
The burning of the starboard vane had filled the sky above us with a haze of metallic aerosols. I saw them begin to move.
Your monster was flexing its muscle.
I touched helmets with Pope. I pointed out the milky swirls passing across the stars.
She glared at me as if I bothered her, threw off her concentration. “I’ll never get this done, you keep interrupting me,” she declared. “Maybe I should just hand the gun to you.” She turned back to her monitors without waiting for a response.
Snatches of radio conversation were getting through the static. I heard the screen crews fighting with some upper-level deformation of the #4 screen, the electron/ anti-proton screen.
All the hairs on my body went straight up. The static surge detectors suddenly pegged off the scale. Robinson and Nuñez waved to me from the equipment bay at the back of the mule. It only occurred to me then—of course, the equipment bay was surrounded in conducting metal. It would be completely insulated.
I called to Pope as they dragged me in behind them. She refused even to acknowledge me.
Nuñez was still closing the door as a flash lit up the sky across the entire plain of fused metal. It was an ancient light, a light from the dawn of creation. Through my leaded visor – through my closed eyelids – I saw the bones of my hands, clamped across my face.
The door slammed. The deck heaved beneath us. I crashed into the ceiling and
then back to the floor, came up tasting blood and swallowing chipped teeth. A hurricane shrieked in my helmet radio, loud enough to split open my head.
My thoughts were on Pope. She was outside the door, just beyond my reach. How had she fared? Had she gotten off her shot?
We stepped outside even while the superheated light receded. The mule was over on its side, and the door was sprung. I had to shove at the door with Nuñez and Mister Robinson to get it open. Pope was gone. I have no idea what happened to her. She was simply gone.
I called out for her, scanned the deck as best I could for some sign of her. None of us ever saw Pope again. However, as I came around the side of the mule, I saw something that will stay with me always.
Rolling out of the shade of a distant cargo bay came the little crew tractor carrying Esteban Contreras’ unlucky Hot Shots.
I took it to be some sort of drifting retinal artifact from the burning light. But it was real. It crossed the blasted desert with the leisurely air of a family on beach holiday.
Each person in the crew cabin sat up straight in their seats, utterly unconcerned about the excursion lighting up the sky before us. They rolled right into it, rigid as a six-pack of cerveza.
I called out to them, but of course they were dead – burned to a blackened husk right inside their bright, shiny hotsuits. Up in the chiefs cabin was Contreras himself, hanging from the window, his hands dragging along the deck as the little train pushed forward into the raging brilliance at the back of the starboard vane.
There was no question we had moments left to us. Already I could see my surge detector flickering again. Your monster had magnetized everything out beyond its moat of liquid metal – the lead shielding as well as the steel in the decking. Its magnetic lair increased even as we hunkered behind our shattered railhead.
Soon it would begin pulling down the polarizing screens. Particles would be unloaded across the ship. They would scatter through the soft parts of the hull and kill everyone standing nearby. Behind the collapsing screens would come the in-falling sky, igniting the fissionable materials on all four vanes.
Mister Robinson and I had no use for panic. Huddled together against the roar of radio interference, we considered our options as if we were discussing the price of 3:00 perbladium on the futures floor at Santa Buenaventura.
Normal circumstances, we would try to heat the site somehow, and cause it to melt in with the metal around it. Even if it remained in a critical configuration, it might be contaminated by melted steel from the deck, or lead, or boron from the surrounding shielding to poison the reaction chain.
That seemed a dubious proposal in this case. Any lump of matter that held Vacuum3 in its heart already knew more about heat than anything we could teach it.
We paused in our discussion as a cluster of tellolites levitated half a meter over the deck, only to land a few centimeters from the tip of my boot. Mister Robinson’s eyes rose from the bit of mongrel matter at our feet to the inferno before us.
“We seem to be in the presence of primordial symmetry,” he said.
This is what reached out to the little pebbles on the deck around us, what had
crushed a tractor into a coolant pipe on the far side of the Blue Highway—the four fundamental forces of nature had rediscovered that symmetry they lost in the first billion-billion-billionth of a second after creation.
“This, from Vacuum3?”
“Or Vacuum4. We’re in no position for a precise assay.”
It was hard not to be over-awed by the majesty of your art. And yet, what did we cower before, after all? A bit of vacuum! The apotheosis of nothingness. Perhaps we wasted our time attacking the pterachnium; the vacuum state bound within might be manipulated more easily.
I put it to Mister Robinson: “These vacuum states run in chains of progression, just like the decay chain of any unstable nucleotide. A couple of steps up from Vacuum3 is a stable plateau not dissimilar to the quantum vacuum state we call home.”
I remember the way he nodded to himself; Mister Robinson was not hurried by desperation or despair.
“If we could define the right particles with our screens, we could push our load of Vacuum3 up to that plateau.”
“Right this second, you know what the temperatures are like beyond those polarizing screens? What kind of particles are going to get through that?”
“Dark matter,” I said. “Weakly interacting super-luminals. They have no electric charge to become entangled in the firestorm. They touch this universe with nothing but the slender fingers of gravity, and nothing but dense matter draws them in. Perhaps they will be sufficient to our needs.”
Mister Robinson considered the proposal for a long moment. “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “No matter what happens to the pterachnium, we’ll be sitting out here when the ship goes super-luminal. The hull will be protected, but out here, we will be exposed to whatever comes down. It hardly matters that these particles are ‘weakly interacting,’ anything will kill you if you get hit by enough of them.”
Mister Robinson began reminiscing about a man he had known in the French Violet, killed by neutrinos – neutrinos of all things. He saw the youngster watching us all wide-eyed. He stopped himself.
I started to suggest we might yet escape. Mister Robinson indicated the impassable blastscape behind us with a single look. “This ship has maybe two minutes to live. What do you think, Mister Seguro? Two minutes before the screens are all bound in a huge magnetic source and start cycling? Where are we going to go in the next two minutes?”
I said, “I’m certainly open to suggestions, Mister Robinson.” He laughed. Mister Robinson and I went back a ways. Neither of us had any particular trouble doing what was necessary to save the ship.
But the youngster, she troubled us some. This was her training flight. This should have been safe and easy. We would never have brought along some young niña on anything more dangerous than nice, easy morghium 414.
I asked her if she understood what we were discussing. She said she did. I asked her if she agreed with our assessment.
She said she did. I detected a softness to her voice. She might have been holding
back her emotions. Yet she never cried for any sort of consideration for her youth or her status. She understood that we were all about to die, and that only the ship mattered now.
I called back to Frances Cruz and made our proposal.
Frances would not hear of it. She found a thousand reasons to doubt my solution. Yet she could find nothing better. I did not have the time to argue, but for her I made the time. It wasn’t easy. How do you explain a decision like this to a special friend and confidant?
I gave myself thirty seconds, and then, when she still could not understand, I gave myself thirty seconds more. I needed to speak to Captain Diaz about our plan, but I couldn’t leave Frances till she understood that the sweetness of my life had been hers, and the only horror I felt at leaving was bound up with her as well.
Captain Diaz cut into our conversation to hear out our proposal. Captain was a decent man, but he could count—three lives against twenty-seven. He told us they would need a gravitational wave detector as near the pterachnium as we could get. Sanoro’s detector had gone dark moments after it had showed us the face of your creature. We had to replace it, so that the nuclear chemistry committee would know how our mission fared. When he went to initiate the screen dump, Frances did not return to the line.
I turned to Nuñez and Robinson. “I set the wave detector myself,” I told them. Mister Robinson made a gesture of indifference. “We have no place to go,” he said. “We might as well come with you.”
“We come along,” Nuñez said in a husky voice. “You falter, we’re there.” She looked ready to make a fight of it if I ordered her back; Sanoro’s death weighed heavy on her.
I had my eye on a spot twenty meters ahead of us. A stub of metal reared up from the smooth-blasted decking. What had been there before your undertaking? I recalled a nuclear furnace near that point. Two stories tall it had been. The tiny mesa in its place rose perhaps a meter tall now.
“We reach that hump in the deck and plant the detector on its further side.” I pointed.
Beyond that little rise lay a final circle of hell, smooth as the surface of an egg. Liquefied steel, I realized, boiling away to gas at its center. Your treasure had corrupted all the metal across the back of the molten mirror. Beneath the shade of my palm, it looked like the gilt of a Rococo picture frame.
I moved forward till the heat in my suit was unbearable. I could hardly swallow for the metallic taste of hard radiation in my mouth. Probing tendrils of lightning thick as rope played over our suits and slammed the deck at our feet. The heat burned through the soles of our boots till I could barely walk.
I planted the spike in the metal decking at the point I could go no further.
I felt the deck tremble beneath me as the ship accelerated. I remember bracing myself for the gauntlet of particles awaiting me on the far side of the light barrier – Would it burn me? Would I have time to feel anything?
But something was wrong. Frances was in my headset, saying something about losing the signal. I was delirious by then. Her words barely made sense.
She was telling me the wave detector that we had just put out had gone silent, even as the energy output had grown more intense. She was asking if I could still see it above the pterachnium site. She thought it had been destroyed.
That wasn’t why she had lost the signal anyway, was it, my friend? Your jewel was gathering itself up, as a giant coastal wave will gather all the water off a beach before it rolls in.
Your creature was coming to fruition at last.
Of course, I was past caring by this time. Zone angels appeared and evaporated before my eyes, as vivid as childhood memories. I doubt I was even conscious.
In my blindness, I stumbled and crashed to the deck. A dire circumstance; the deck glowed red hot. The flesh of my shoulder burned from the heat of it. Indeed, this is where my shoulders and back acquired those handsome keloids you have been admiring so surreptitiously.
I was a breath away from unconsciousness, and that would have meant my death. Seeking relief, I took a sip from my water hose. Nothing came out but superheated air. The water had gone to steam and been recycled into a safety reservoir till it could recondense. Of course, I would be long dead by then.
In the middle of this horror came a sudden vision of preternatural quiet. I saw the village square in Santa Susana de la Reina – the wind funnels creaking in the cupola of the old mission, the black moss and the purple, the smell of the constant rain.
– Rain!
How vivid the memory of rain came to me in that moment. In my mouth I held the sweet smell of the wet timbers beneath Boregos Bridge. I could see the mirrored pools filling the broken streets, their surfaces cut by black lizards.
I saw rain running in sheets beyond a limp curtain. I saw a bare shoulder, silhouetted against the milky light. A friend in the street below called up to us to unlock the door and let him in, while we lay in the dark and laughed at him and everyone else in the world who knew not what we knew in that moment.
I heard the shouting again, but it wasn’t Esteban Contreras calling up to Frances and me from the street. It was Mister Robinson. He was calling to me from a ripple of metal just a few meters to port. He might have been on the other side of the French Violet for the gulf of pain and light between us.
Nuñez was stranded behind a small rise just beyond him. She was waving to us, making some gesture. I could not make it out. A clearing of silence breached the static roar just long enough that I could catch her words.
“Here it comes,” she cried. Somehow, Nuñez had heard the countdown to light speed on her suit radio: The sky was coming in.
I looked around for some bit of cover to hide myself. Something split the glare just off to my right. I had barely noticed it while planting the gravity wave detector; it had been still as any other bit of metal on that blasted expanse. But as I looked closer, I realized the shadow was articulated with radiator fins and circulating packs.
I shaded my eyes with my palm and peered into the glare that beat up from the metal decking. Here was Pablo Sanoro, frozen in an attitude of intent concentration—staring
at the gravity wave detector he had worked at even as he burned to death.
I pulled him down over me just as the stars smeared into rainbows. The deck burned my back. The incoming particles burned my fingers as they gripped around Sanoro’s shoulders.
I held tight. I spent a micro epoch in that way – my back blistering against the super-heated deck, and Pablo Sanoro just inches from my leaded visor, grinning the wizened, squinting smile of a face with flesh and muscle drawn taut.
I heard Nuñez scream. Pinned under Sanoro’s hotsuit, I raised my head just enough to see your treasure plunge through a hundred-ton metal deck as if it were soft taffy.
A crevasse spread out from the back of the vane. It etched a jagged line right out to us. Nuñez disappeared down the hole as it spread through the deck beneath her feet.
Robinson grasped for her as she slipped out of sight. In that moment, your creature reached up through the metal decking and took him in a 130 Tesla magnetic field. I saw Robinson twist and heave like a rag doll as the flesh peeled from his bones.
A cloud of steam enveloped him from somewhere below and he was gone. I remember staring in amazement as it rose into the sky. Where had that come from?
I didn’t realize till much later, but your monster had crashed through three floors below the main deck, severing a dozen plumbing mains along the way.
This is what killed so many people inside the hull – not fire, but water. The water in all the lines flashed to steam and exploded throughout the interior of the ship.
After some time I became lucid. I found myself lying along the palisade of a canyon, cut to the depths of the starboard vane.
All of my mates were dead. All of our equipment sucked down into the hole your monster had made for itself.
It is ironic, but this saved me from dying. With your pterachnium sunk away out of sight, the heat and magnetism refocused on some point in the undervane.
I thought I might get help from one of the other vane crews. I went down to the mechanics’ armory to see about some assistance. But the mechanics’ armory had been closest to the back of the vane as your treasure came into its own. My compañeros had been among the first inside the hull to die.
The ship above the armory was utterly silent. It was a catalog of unpleasant endings. People in airtight cabins suffocated or burned. People closer to fissures in the hulls, destroyed by explosive decompression.
I found Frances on the floor leading out of the forward head. Blood pooled out of her ears. I tell myself she was killed instantly. Who knows? Perhaps she was.
No, please. Allow me to tell the story; just looking at her, I could re-enact the moment of her death. Indeed, it is not without its amusing side.
You see, there is a standing rule never to go to the toilet during a hot load. I mean, these things have happened before. These ships are compact, no matter how large they appear, and the plumbing lines always end up going throughout the ship, and a few people every year end up being killed this way.
So Frances knew the risks of going to the bathroom when she did. But the emergency had gone on for several hours now, and her need had taken on an urgency of its own.
Had she been truly born of wealth she could have squatted in the corner like a house cat. But no, she was born to the merchant class, and such compromise with her dignity left her too little to hold on to. The steam explosion blew out the wall behind her head.
Pardon, my friend. I am not unaware how this must seem to a man of refinement like yourself. Yet, this has an air of the hilarious: A princess dies while sitting on the toilet – a good joke from God, yes? An amusing trick.
– Don’t touch me.
And do not tell me again how sorry you are. Or how necessary it was. Or how I would have done the same in your position …
Excuse me, please. No, no – It is I who must apologize. You have been more than patient. The story reaches denouement.
I found myself carrying Frances around in my arms. I can’t tell you where we were going. All the officers’ quarters were blown open to space. I just could never find a place to set her down. So I carried her.
Eventually, I found myself up in the Heidelburgh Tun, where the officers had made their last stand.
Imagine my surprise to find someone alive up here. More surprising still to find him walking around in a hotsuit from the mechanics’ armory. This would be Galvan, the navigator.
I said, “That might be a tight fit in an escape pod.”
He was startled at the sound of my voice. He spun around, looking for me. Of course, I was a voice in his radio – I might have been anywhere. Even so, he hid something behind his back, like a child with an embarrassing secret.
“Seguro,” he said. And then, “Joaquin. You survived.” He did not sound overjoyed to see me.
I asked him what he had in his hand. He actually fought me as I reached around to take it from him.
What do you suppose it was, this thing that would make a timid little man punch at me and dig at my air hose to kill me?
You know what it was. It was a clock, wasn’t it. But a very special clock. No doubt, you see them all the time. They are common on the floor of the Bright Matter Exchange. Familiar to shipping agents and futures traders.
We call them “true clocks.” They are used to track the true passage of time back at a ship’s home port.
To the uninitiated, this may seem a small matter. You, of course, know better. Our ship plies the clouds of Orion at speeds approaching light. A dozen times during the course of a run, we accelerate, we brake. Shipboard time changes with
each fluctuation. We cross over the light barrier on our way to and from work. When we do, time is calculated in imaginary numbers. A clock set to follow such distortions is not the sort of thing a man on a navigator’s salary would own.
Galvan tried to tell me this was a part of his navigator’s kit. Indeed, the navigator’s loft is equipped to track the constant passage of time, but only relative to our own course. The clock in Galvan’s hand was synchronized to the time on the eastern shore of a little island on a deserted moon in the San Marcos star system.
This moon, in fact. This very moon. What do you suppose, my friend?
Galvan dissembled as I asked him his purpose up here. In fact, he had been completing a course correction. He claimed he was moving us out of shipping lanes. But we were headed for this star up in the French Violet, this Michele D’avinet. He had no ready explanation why.
I put it to him that we were partners in this matter – each had something the other wanted. Galvan had the name of the monster that destroyed my ship. I had Galvan’s air hose, pinched between my fingers.
In that way we bartered for the next hour: One answer, one gulp of air.
I learned the name of Beltran Seynoso, weapons designer to half the armies, militias, and mercenary groups in the French Violet. He told me of the star, Michele D’avinet. He was not specific as to your loyalties; I suspect he did not know them himself. But he described your plan in some detail.
He told me about your audacious scheme to poison the sun these people lived under and warm themselves against. A bold stroke, Sir! Set my ship on course for this star, D‘avinet, then consume it into a singularity on the way. What would happen if a singularity the size of my old ship had crashed into a star like Michele D’avinet? Billions of people would die terribly. It would be a tragedy of majestic proportions.
Truly, you are a man of vision.
Galvan became frantic toward the end. He gave minute details of your operation. He told me everything about you that he could think of. He answered questions I hadn’t thought to ask. I suspect he padded what he knew with outright speculations.
You mustn’t blame him for this; he believed his life lasted as long as our conversation. Indeed, he bought each breath with another bit of truth. And when he ran out of truth …
My actions shock you. Forgive me; I should play more the hero in my own drama. But she is gone, you see? And I am left with only one role that matters. I am your delivery man.
I see that your scheme was sound in its fundamentals, but there was a complication: Vacuum3 collapses into a singularity in sixteen nanoseconds. That would never do. Galvan needed time to set the ship’s course. As he was a navigator of mediocre talents, course corrections would be required on the way. And you had to leave the illusion that he would escape.
So you set the thing to dissipate most of its energy in gravitational waves. No matter. The density would be sufficient when the time came. Small singularities would form, consume all the matter around them, begin to coalesce.
I am in no position to mentor a man of your estimable talents. But perhaps one
or two suggestions for next time? There is a phase transition in the production of pterachnium. Below its critical mass, pterachnium, at least in the form you created, becomes quiet and morose. It can be captured. The careful man can manipulate it into a more pliant form.
I myself journeyed down into the deep fissure that cut through the heart of the starboard vane. It was cold when I arrived. The radiations had banked, the ferocious gravities and magnetic fluctuations had subsided. The liquefied metals that had chased us through the undervane had now congealed into curtains, flood plains, weird minarets.
There, I found your precious, bound up in clusters of tellolite nodules at the bottom of the chasm. Though my petty sophistries had failed to save the ship, they had managed to convert your Vacuum3 into a pliant state, a form that allows it to be carried without collapsing spontaneously into singularity.
Yes, my friend. Your treasure lives. I have even returned it to its original liquid suspension. This, after all, is the way things are done in the production of commercial isotopes since the days of the great nuclear reactors. Atoms of target material are held in liquid suspension to allow their thorough saturation by incoming particles.
It is quiet now. It exists in two sub-critical drams, but when poured together, they undergo a phase transition into that tool of petty vengeance you procured at such cost.
Don’t worry, they’re close at hand.
Are you sure you won’t have some of this very fine tea? You won’t mind if I pour myself a little topper then, will you?
I noticed your tea pots as soon as I entered the kitchen. Yes, they definitely attracted my interest. You make tea in the Chinese manner – one pot to boil the water, one pot to brew the tea. Excellent. Exactly right. None of this tea bag chic for you, my friend.
Do the two pots have a history? You are a tea man. You know that a good tea pot is like a good wallet, or a good pair of boots. It ages. It carries a certain history about with it.
My own set is humble by comparison. Cheap porcelain, brightly painted with scenes from a port town on the lee side of Spanish Space. I would have replaced it long ago, except it was a gift, you see. From someone whose tastes ran to the simple and sweet.
No matter. Life is the sum of simple delights – a tawdry souvenir from Puerta Estrella. A smile reflected in dark eyes. A cup of tea with a newfound friend. One cannot shun such bagatelles.
Not when death is sixteen nanoseconds away.