Theft of Fire

The Edge of Sunlight

To travel solar north from the plane of the ecliptic, the great disc in which the planetary orbits are aligned, is to travel into a vast, silent darkness.

But space is never truly empty. There are many, many objects gravitationally bound to the Sun, partnered to its 226 million year orbital journey around Sagittarius A*, the Great Devourer, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy. And some of them are out here, above the ring of planetary orbits.

Out here, the short-period comets of the “Scattered Disc” pass through the cold and dark portions of their sharply-canted orbits, simple dirty snowballs, tailless in the dark region beyond the warmth, light, and solar wind of inner space.

Out here, the dwarf planets Eris and Gonggong swing upwards into the dark on every pass around their distant parent star, along with thousands of rocks too small and irregular to be any sort of planet at all, and too distant and dark to be spotted by the telescopes of the warm, bright inner system.

The spacecraft does not pass within a million kilometers of any of these. In the vast expanses of trans-Neptunian space, the odds against this are extreme. And luck, capricious lover that she is, is done with this particular vessel, and has been for many weeks now.

Beyond the wide orbits of these tiny specks, fifteen billion kilometers out, the solar wind of charged particles streaming from the sun, spread cold and thin, begins to break up against the colder, thinner, medium of interstellar hydrogen, churning in a froth too slow and gentle and microscopically insignificant to be seen with the human eye.

This is the termination shock boundary. And this, the spacecraft collides with, for it is everywhere. It encloses the entire system in its shell, a sphere surrounding the star, stretched in the direction of its travel through the western spiral arm of the galaxy. The intruder disperses the flows of particles and gas, cutting through them, meeting such insubstantial resistance that even the most sensitive instruments aboard barely register it, were anyone even watching the readouts to notice.

No one is.

The spacecraft moves on, tumbling end over end at a single rotation per minute, a thin cylinder swinging around a fat one, gently simulating a weak gravity for anyone who might be aboard.

Further out, so much further out that light takes a full four hours to traverse the distance, the solar wind breaks up utterly at the heliopause point, and, this, too, the spacecraft tumbles through, 16 days later, traveling at a small, but not insignificant, percentage of the velocity of light itself.

This isn't the end. Far ahead, so far ahead that the spacecraft will not reach its inner edge for three full years, lies the Oort Cloud, a loose, cold sphere of proto-comets, icy planetesimals, and frozen debris that stretches halfway to the nearest stars.

The spacecraft will exit this zone in another one hundred and sixty years. Along the way, it will collide with nothing, touch nothing, see nothing. It will not pass within a million kilometers of anything large enough to see with the unaided human eye. The Oort Cloud is far thinner, darker, and colder than the merest and most arctic of wisps of the earthly water vapor structure it is named for.

The spacecraft will not be stopped here, or later. Or ever.

It will pass out of the influence of its home star utterly, never to return. Tens of thousands of years later, it will pass within a few billion kilometers of a white dwarf star that its creator species knows only as a number, but it will pass quickly, far too distant and too rapid to enter any sort of orbit. It will sail through that band of light, a strange visitor from an alien land, and depart forever out into eternal darkness.

In time, it will exit its home galaxy, and plunge on and on through the endless ocean of night, until the distant end of the universe, when time itself creaks, when any laws of physics its creators know begin to break down and the ultimate fate of the two paired cylinders becomes… unknowable.

The White Cat will live forever.

Where it is now, in the shallows of space, the littoral zone of light, where the solar wind breaks up, the small craft displays no visible signs of life. There is no hint of any plan to avoid its one-way ticket to the end of the universe. Its instrument clusters do not move or radiate. Every light on its hull is dark. Scars of forceful impact, here and there, mark its hull, with no signs of any effort to repair them.

The White Cat might as well be dead.

But in the infrared spectrum, far below any frequency range visible to its creator species, a little heat radiation escapes into the thin and frigid darkness around the hull. It could, perhaps, be the simple entropic process of a warm object cooling to thermal equilibrium with its surroundings, with the status quo of cold and darkness that will characterize the remainder of its existence.

It would require precise measurement, and careful calculation, to disprove this guess. But somewhere in that hull is a source of heat, burning low, constrained by the capacity of single, small, radiothermal backup generator.

And in the large cylinder of the hold, past layers of hull plate and radiation shielding, in the relative cold and dark which is nothing to the cold, dark, and emptiness without, at the very center, a tiny, but bright, electric light is burning.

Hold fast.

When humans sailed oceans of water on our home planet, we used to tattoo it across our knuckles, a charm to fix a man's grip in the rigging, to hold him in rough weather from a fall to the wooden deck, or the unforgiving sea.

It's written across my knuckles, too. I'm not superstitious. But I honor what I came from.

Hold fast.

I don't have rigging to hold onto, just a steel catwalk of cheap modular scaffolding around the drive spindle, throwing sharp linear shadows in the glare of my single LED work light.

Standing on its platform, I can scarcely fall. But I hold fast all the same, my knuckles white on the steel pipe, gripping, tense, as I watch the drive core.

The humming throb rises, pulses through the cold darkness of the hold, vibrates the scaffolding, the cargo racks, washes around and through me, shakes my skull, my spine, the walls of my chest. I can feel the sting of it in the new scars on my ribs, where I cut away Miranda's careful stitching just yesterday.

On my neural display, drive core temperature creeps from black to blue to green. Warning text lights up the screen, scrolling too fast to read or follow, but I've disabled every safety cutoff I could find, reading the tech manuals over and over until the diagrams hung behind my eyelids in my sleep, and the humming doesn't die, it rises.

Hold fast.

Higher in pitch now, louder, but… smoothing out. I'm staring, fixed eyes, on the tangle of hand-bent pipes that I've welded in place of the damaged primary coolant manifold. Seams are holding, display tells me the water pressure is good, but it's still right where I put it. The entire spindle assembly, hundreds of kilos of it, is right where it started.

Come on, you bastard. Move. Spin.

Temp's in the yellow now. Within the central vacuum shaft that runs through the White Cat, exotic fields crush hydrogen into a line of space so small that Newtonian models of physics break down. I'm feeding the tiniest possible amount of fuel, barely enough to tick the drive over, idling, but hydrogen fusion is the beating heart of stars, the mighty engine of the universe, and even the smallest breath of it pours out the fire of the gods. Unless my improvised heat management systems kick in soon, the field emitters will melt, and…

Well, there's a reason why I'm floating right here by the drive core. If I'm going to die out here, let me not starve or freeze or run out of oxygen. Let it be fast and clean and brilliant, in a wash of plasma fire. Either I get this working, or I go out on my terms. Not stranded. Not trapped like a rat in a dark and freezing cage. Not flying out in an endless trajectory towards the big empty night of interstellar space.

I'm not giving up yet. The Princess… no, Miranda, my crewmate, was right when she said it. I don't give up. Ever. I'd have to be dead or disabled.

And I've got things left to do. This isn't over.

Temperature creeping towards the red now.

Hold fast.

Come on, work. Why won't you work? I checked everything. Over and over again.

I should shut down the reactor, recheck everything, try again, but I don't. Seven times I've tried this, seven times I've bailed out, shut down the drive, reconfigured, tried again. I'm out of ideas. Temperature solidly in the red now.

Turn, damn you.

I'm flirting with death, here.

Hold fast. There's one last thing I have to try.

I grip the scaffolding, tuck my legs into a ball, and kick. Something else our ancestors did. Dumb monkey repair tricks. Hit it with a wrench and hope.

The spindle shudders, and I bite back a gasp as the shock runs through my ribs.

Miranda would probably fuss. She would say I shouldn't be out of bed yet. I'd insist I have to get this working, and she would try to nag me back to resting. Hell, she'd probably put her tiny hands on my chest and try to shove me back to bed.

I wish she would.

Universe doesn't care what we wish for.

I kick the spindle again, ignoring the stab of pain down my side. I can heal later. If there is a later.

Did it just shift?

Kick.

And the manifold, the clusters of pipes and tubing, the radiator vanes… move. Creep to the right. So slowly I can't trust my eyes, not at first, but… no, there. It's moving. It's definitely moving.

Spinning. For real this time, a stately procession around the drive core, one turn every several seconds. On my display, temperatures stop rising. Plenty of warning indicators, the computers are not happy, but pressurized water is flowing, and the sound of the engine… stabilizes. Pulses with familiar harmonics, the song of smooth running.

I have drive idle.

And that means I have power. No need to ration it now. I trip the lights, the heater controls, and the cargo hold sings to life, stirring with currents of instant warm air, redirected right from the drive cooling system.

Piece by piece, I bring the White Cat to life. Climate control, air pumps, water recycler…

Water recycler. I can take a shower. It's been… weeks.

… lidar array, XNAV orientation sensors…

I can find out where I am.

… high-gain antenna…

I can look for other ships.

… mid-frequency communications radio laser.

I can call civilization.

I summon the nav plotter display, zoomed out as wide as possible, and the whole solar system spreads out before me. I'm high above the plane of the ecliptic, way further out than I thought, beyond the termination shock boundary, in the heliopause zone.

I'm also coasting faster than I thought, spinning out into the depths of space, where the sun is just another pinprick in a tapestry of stars. Every second, I'm thousands of kilometers further away from the worlds.

And I've been resting, and healing, and fixing the drive, for… weeks, while those seconds, those thousands of kilometers, passed.

I didn't realize how far out I was. With most of the ship shut down to save power, there was no point wasting any on gathering data I couldn't have done a thing about.

This far out, I don't actually know if I can call civilization after all. I don't even know if anyone's ever been this far out before. I might have set some sort of record, a sort of strange, slumbering Magellan, doped up on painkillers and dreaming of Miranda. Of her face as they dragged her away, kicking and screaming and protesting, towards safety and salvation and life.

I don't think anyone will come to rescue me, kicking and screaming or not. Even if they would, targeting a com laser at this distance might not even be possible, and focusing it so someone could hear me…

Doubtful.

Even then, getting a rescue mission, doubly so. I could be a hero to the entire solar system right now, or a villain. Or just some loser with a flat crypto account.

Or a target.

No, I'd rather not pick up the phone and let them know where I am. Let's find out if drive thrust works. Can't run a diagnostic, though. I'm running too far out of spec. The computer would throw a fit and shut down the drive instantly.

I just have to try it and see if I die. And hey, I'm not a nuclear fireball yet. Hold fast, right?

Right.

Call up a virtual throttle. Set it for the lowest sensitivity possible. Let's see what I have.

So what am I waiting for? All I have to do is ease it in. One tenth of a gravity. A twentieth. Almost anything would eventually slow me down, turn me around, get me back.

Oh. That's it, isn't it?

I don't know what I'm coming back to. Is Leela free and broadcasting a treasure trove of knowledge through some internet relay station? Is she still running and hiding, or have they given up chasing her?

For any given value of “they.”

Is she even alive, or, well, in her case, still functioning? Or was she intercepted and shot to pieces after all? What did the news say about us? Am I a public figure now? What does Orbital space think of me? Did we dominate the news, or get eclipsed by the latest viral meme or SpaceX press release?

Is there an Open Xenotechnology Foundation, now, under Miranda's direction, a thriving enterprise, flush with donated funds, idealistic staff, and corporate sponsorships? Or just a website and nothing else?

Did anyone even notice what we did?

We.

Miranda and I. That's the part I've been not-thinking about. The ship feels so peaceful and so… empty. No one to fight with. No one to talk to.

Is she back in the dubiously welcoming bosom of her family? Restarting her AI project, with lots of new investors, now that Leela is so self-evidently a brilliant success? Beating the talk-show circuit, humble-bragging about the nobility of her decision to share Builder technology with everyone?

All of the above?

And what happens if I show up? It's not like she has any further need for me. And, hell, a couple of months ago, I'd have said that would be that. But, now, I don't know. I remember the feel of her lying against me, holding my hand, stroking my hair, and I'm not so sure what she'd want.

Or what I want. From her.

We never got a chance to figure that out. We never even got to say goodbye.

Leela's out there, too. She, at least, will definitely want to see me again. And, hell, it's that or stay here and be a space hermit until the food runs out. Might as well bite the bullet.

So, virtual throttle, low sensitivity, get a good grip on the scaffold… and…

…eyes closed, waiting for it….

…three, two…

…watch the drive temp…

There.

It's so gradual when it happens, not the hard slap of gravity restored, but slowly, 'down' defines itself, and I'm not floating over the platform. I'm standing on it.

It works.

It's slow.

It's underpowered.

The computer tells me that drive efficiency is down by a factor of three.

And with all that extra heat, the core temp starts to creep up if I push it above point one six gravities.

But it works.

Just a little bit, and a little bit is enough. I'm going to live.

I can fly again, and I'm at the helm. I can steer her where I want to. I may be off in the deep black, flying so fast it'll take me more weeks just to stop. I may be so far from civilization that it'll take me another hundred days or so to get back. Maybe more, depending on how that drive behaves. I'll probably have to ration the food.

I may be alone out here without my… team? My… crewmates?

My friends.

But I can fly again, and that means I am whole again, complete. Alive. That means this isn't over. I can point myself at Mars, put enough sky behind me, and see the rest of my species again. See civilization.

See what happened.

See what I've done to the place.

It's time to hoist a sail for home