Noumenon Infinity

“ADCO?” she asked last.

“Go,” said Stone.

“Then let’s do this.”

A few minutes later, the dragon fruit of a craft hovered in front of the windows momentarily before Stone sent it on its way.

The time ticked by as it always did, dragging out while they waited for the pod to achieve a safe distance. Vanhi watched over the team, making sure everyone looked as they should: relaxed, focused.

“Be advised,” de Valdivia said. “I have telemetry readings in the red …” His finger tracked a line on one screen. It jumped where it should have been steady.

“Copy. Where is that instrumentation located? Can you patch me the feed?” Vanhi asked.

“It’s the rear left quadrant,” he said. “Vibrations, there’re—something’s on. Something’s using power, but I can’t—”

“SD MEC, are you reading the same vibrations?” she asked. De Valdivia’s readout popped onto her leftmost screen. There was a distinct tremor, yes, but the AI wasn’t pinpointing its location. She glanced at the visual feeds. Nothing looked amiss on the test area cameras. But the pod was still little more than a shining dot on most of them. She flipped to the flight path monitor.

“Starting to get a lean,” said Stone. “Shouldn’t have to course correct this much.”

“Copy. Can anybody tell me where the aberrant energy is centered?” Vanhi asked, bringing up the real-time system log.

“It’s pulling starboard,” Stone said.

“It’s the drive itself,” said de Valdivia. “It’s got to be a malfunction in the AI quantum-reaction regulation. It looks like a compensation, but the main power hasn’t been cued, so there’s nothing to compensate for.”

“Can we reboot the AI?”

“Already initiating shutdown.”

The pod—a blip on her screen—was engulfed in white light.

Everyone gasped.

No, no, no. Damn it. “Did we lose it?” She held her breath, frantically hitting refresh on all of her feeds. “Did we lose it?” she demanded, articulating every syllable.

“No!” It was Stone. “I’m still—it’s fighting me, I can’t—steering’s out, it’s veering back.”

“Talk to me,” Vanhi said, voice even and expression stern while her heart battered itself inside her ribs. Losing a pod wasn’t new. They’d lost plenty, expected to lose the majority of what they had left. But this …

The white light flared out, but what was left in its wake wasn’t debris, or a dormant pod. The probe’s hull glimmered with new life. Around it, some sort of field pulsed, fading from petal-pink to tangerine and back again.

And Stone was right—it was sailing toward the convoy.

“Convoy Control—”

“We’ve alerted Captain Tan. He’s standing by to take evasive action.”

“Copy that. ADCO, TRAJ, any way you can reel it in, get it to stop?”

“It’s not responding,” Stone gritted, pounding the holokeys at his station.

“What happened? What went wrong, MID AIM?”

“I don’t know,” de Valdivia insisted, hands flying over his keyboard, brow furrowed, jaw stiff. “I rebooted. It should have gone dead. Should have—unless … Unless the meters were off, and we weren’t detecting … No … wait, wait …”

He didn’t have to elaborate. Vanhi’s internal monologue started to hammer out two words on repeat: Oh shit. Oh shit.

Oh shit.

The AI wasn’t malfunctioning, it was doing its damned job. It was trying to keep the system from engaging. Somehow the SD drive had started to pull power, to dive, and the AI was trying to hold it back.

But then they’d shut it down …

“Are we getting any readings from Thirty-Three’s external sensors? Talk to me, people, that’s not an SD bubble like I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m getting unusual readings,” called a woman’s voice with a heavy Danish accent—Esmée Jensen, Mechanical Maintenance Officer. “Power surges.”

“Distance between the pod and the convoy is shrinking, sir,” said Stone.

Vanhi had her head down, frantically looking for a way to remotely bar the pod’s path or even destroy it. They could launch number Thirty-Four. ADCO could pilot it on an intercept course, crash the two pods—

“These are similar to the same kind of surge forces found inside SD drives when they’ve hit main sequence,” Esmée called again.

“Copy,” Vanhi gritted out.

Breath lurched. Captain Tan must have ordered the convoy to move.

“Doctor Kapoor!” Stone shouted.

Her head snapped up. She followed his outstretched hand, pointed like an arrow through the casement.

Thoomp, dooooozsh. Thoomp, dooooozsh.

There was no noise, but the sudden slow-motion leapfrogging of the pod created dramatic sound effects in her mind.

For a moment the pod looked like it was imploding, the pinkish-orangish field shrinking, turning in on itself, until there was nothing, it was gone.

That was the thoomp.

Half a second later, the field and probe appeared again, kilometers closer than before.

The violent, static-encrusted expansion—sparking, widening—engulfed her mind like a deluge of water. Dooooozsh.

The lights in the observation lounge turned purple. Captain Tan’s voice echoed over the comms system. “In order to avoid collision, we are engaging the SD drive—”

Thoomp.

Dooooozsh.