Ship in a Bottle

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            Spacemaster Eshervat crackled electricity along his tarsal-spines.  “It’ll work,” it communicated to Spacebender Terestat.

            “I wish I had your confidence,” Terestat conveyed through subatomic vibrations.  A flicker of lightning traced its dorsal ridge, though it affected to be too busy consulting its notes to notice.

            “It’ll work,” Eshervat repeated.  “All we need is a little push.”

            After making more adjustments and ensuring that the calibrations were appropriate for the compressed spatial geometry inside the blackbody prison bottle, Terestat slithered back from the controls.  “All is readiness, Spacemaster.”

            Eshervat coiled around from the engineering station to take its place on its throne.  “Finally.  Spacecrew!  Full starboard displacement!”

            The ship’s antimatter reactors, idled within the prison, burst to life, and the spacecrew channeled the energy to the ultracondensers.  A few stray, exotic particles escaped and were absorbed on the blackbody’s surface, but most of the energy was channeled into micro-singularities lining the control surfaces.  Within the compressed spherical spatial geometry of the prison bottle there seemed nowhere for Eshervat’s vessel to go, but it nonetheless strained sideways, as if trying to touch the blackbody’s unreachable inner surface.

            “Is it working?” Eshervat called down to Terestat.

            “Impossible to tell,” Terestat reminded the spacemaster.  “We can’t perceive anything beyond the blackbody.”

            “Right.”  Eshervat bared its teeth.  “Then we’ll find out if we crash!”             Outside their private spacetime prison, the spherical blackbody, already coated in an eon of interstellar dust, hurtled on through vast emptiness.  Perhaps its trajectory changed by the barest smidgeon, but inside, the crew of the Nameless Scourge knew only their prison, a helpless ship in a bottle.

            At a generic desk in a nameless building sprouting in the Mojave Desert, Colonel Douglas Merriwether glared at sweaty Captain Elberson.  “You did what?”

            Captain Elberson cleared his throat to repeat himself.  Merriwether forestalled him.  “You managed to do the one thing that would guarantee her involvement.”

            “Well, I thought…”

            “Clearly you didn’t.”  Merriwether raised his voice.  “Had you, you would have managed the simple task of ensuring that Colonel Sadi learned nothing of this project.”

            “Well, she is the Space Systems director…”

            Merriwether spoke over him.  “Instead, she now knows about the project, and is on her way here.  Have you any idea how difficult this will be?”

            “Well, I…”

            “Get out.”  Merriwether pointed at the door while Elberson mouthed uselessly.  “Out!”  Elberson snapped his polished heels together, executed a precise about-face, and marched from the colonel’s office.

            With his (former) executive officer gone, Merriwether pinched his nose and stared at the blank office wall before he returned to work.  With Colonel Sadi involved, he needed to prepare.

            He knew better than to let an adversary gain the initiative, and he knew Cardice Sadi.  A quick search of his inbox produced the necessary information, and after he composed his thoughts, he dialed the number.

            The phone was picked up on the other end after three rings.  “This is Cardice.”

            “Cardice!  It’s Doug.  How are you?”  Merriwether hoped stress wasn’t obvious in his voice.

            “Alright.  I’ve a flight to catch this afternoon, but you probably already knew that.  What can I do for you?”  Cardice didn’t sound stressed, and that irritated Merriwether more than an argument.

            He couldn’t tell the Space Systems director not to come; Elberson ruined that, and now was time for damage control.  “I’m sorry you learned about this whole thing from some captain.  I was going to call you as soon as I cleared things up.”

            A pause, and Merriwether wondered if Cardice heard the lie, but she wasn’t that politically savvy.  It was just his conscience bothering him, as Cardice so often caused.  “No worries.  We’ll talk more when I arrive, but isn’t this exciting?  This discovery: it’s a dream come true.”

            Or a nightmare.  Cardice was always too optimistic.  “Absolutely.  It’ll be like old times.  See you when you arrive.”  He hung up before Cardice could say more and tried to channel some of her optimism.  He failed.

            Cardice didn’t reach her hotel until 2330, and left at 0530 to reach base.  Merriwether deployed every delaying tactic he conceived to slow her, from misplaced paperwork to obsequious functionaries, and she still managed to rap on his door at 0725.

            “Enter,” he called.

            Worse, she was chipper.  Merriwether was on his second mug of coffee and doubted he was as awake as Cardice, but he rose and forced a smile.  “Cardice.  It’s been too long.”

            Appearing completely unharried by the gauntlet she traversed to reach this point, Cardice smiled and clasped his hand.  “Indeed.  But worth it, to be here now.  Can we see it?”

            Hoping that he didn’t appear as sick as he felt, Merriwether nodded.  “This way.”

            Once the accumulated detritus of untold lightyears of space travel was chipped away, the object within appeared quite ordinary to casual inspection.  It was a sphere, perfectly black and nonreflective, with just the faintest suggestion of a metallic sheen to its unblemished surface.  Despite the scientists’ care in extracting it, Doctor Jiles claimed that it was unlikely human tools could even scratch the surface.

            It was isolated within a cleanroom, kept behind layers of glass, metal, and concrete, and sealed away in an isolated environment of telepresence robots miles from the control station, which was a forty minute drive from the main base.  Since the analysis of satellite infrared observations of the impact crater revealed the completely non-radiating anomaly that was the sphere, no human came within five miles of the object.  The safety protocols made study more challenging, but no one was taking chances.

            “After all this time, all our dreams,” Cardice mused when Merriwether showed the live feed of the object from the control station, “it’s so obvious.  I always thought our first indication of extraterrestrial life would be more…ambiguous.”

            Merriwether agreed, although he didn’t share her excitement about the signal’s clarity.  Ambiguity would make his job much easier.  “I’m sure you want to talk to the scientists about their theories.  Way above my head, I admit.”

            Cardice did not look away from the screen.  “Absolutely.  Where did it come from?  Why was it built?  What is it?  Was it sent here, specifically, or to find planets like ours, or is its presence now just an accident?”  She turned back toward Merriwether.  “When will we open it?”

            “What?”  Merriwether felt a chill that had nothing to do with the control station’s temperature.  “We’re not opening it,” he answered before he could think.  “That’s crazy.  It’s far too dangerous.”

            “It’s not Pandora’s jar,” Cardice retorted.  “This is an unprecedented opportunity.  It could change everything!”

            “Yes, exactly,” Merriwether snapped.  “Even a hint of what we found would spark global unrest, much less what we might learn from it.  We are gathering preliminary safety information, locking that sphere in the same canisters we use to store nuclear fuel rods, and burying it.”

            “But think of the missed opportunity,” Cardice protested.  “New energy sources, new materials, new medicines…maybe even contact with an alien species!  That sphere is the catalyst, Doug.  And, frankly, it’s here.  Burying it will only delay the inevitable.  Remember all of our talks about the technological singularity?  This is the start, Doug.”

            This was exactly why Merriwether had wanted Colonel Sadi kept unaware.  He did remember their conversations, but…this was reality, not an idealistic hypothetical.  “Well, I intend to delay it as long as possible.  That sphere is more dangerous than any weapon this country possesses.  It’s fortunate that it’s safely in military custody, where reckless scientists can’t unleash who-knows-what upon us.”

            As soon as it was said, Merriwether saw the look in Cardice’s eyes and knew he’d made a mistake.  “That shouldn’t be our call.  There’s opportunity here!”

            “And colossal risk!  That’s always been your problem: you’re too blasted optimistic.”

            “And your problem, Doug, is that you’re too busy currying favor to have a single original thought for yourself.”

            “This is the military!”  Merriwether wrestled his temper back under control and folded his arms.  “Anyways, it’s not your decision.  This is my jurisdiction.”

            “How like a military man, to think that a decision like this should rest solely in your power.  I won’t allow it,” Cardice declared.

            “You’re in the military!  There’s nothing you can do about it!”  Merriwether failed to maintain calm, or even professional detachment.  The unacknowledged vitriol that underlay their previous debates was being dredge up and fed into this single argument.

            Cardice narrowed her eyes.  She never exploded like Merriwether, but her voice grew icy precise.  “You’re not the only one with contacts, Colonel, and this decision shouldn’t be made at our level.  If you’re not willing to budge, then I’ll see you in DC.”  She spun on her heel and marched from the control station.

            Even at 0300, so many people thronged outside of the base entrances that security forces had to escort Colonel Merriwether the last mile to the gate.  The Mojave night was cold, it was the middle of nowhere, and still people came.  And that was just what Merriwether saw on his drive to base.  The news vindicated him further, but too late.  DC was a swamp that leaked like a sieve.

            Somehow, Colonel Sadi was already at the control station, chatting with a downcast group of scientists and engineers.  Merriwether shook his head at them and avoided Cardice’s gaze as he arrived.  They exchanged the stiffest pleasantries, brought together a final time to bear witness.  Their former collegial relationship was entirely erased by the arguments before the congressional hearing.

            On the screen, the telepresence robots began to move, their operators guiding them to pick up the sphere and deposit it in the lead-lined canister that constituted the first layer of security around the alien artifact.  With the sensors removed, no one noticed that slight tremor that emanated from within the sphere.  Merriwether thought he should be satisfied – this was what he’d advocated – but now it seemed too little and too late, and bitter, besides.  He would miss Cardice.

            The simple process of packaging the sphere into its canister, sealing the canister, and locking the assembly into a titanium crate which would eventually be surrounded in three feet of concrete before being locked in an abandoned missile silo somewhere in Montana took almost three hours.  When it was finished, Merriwether could not resist turning to Cardice.

            “Was this your plan all along?  For the news to leak so that the people would try to force their say?” he asked.

            Cardice shook her head.  “You know I don’t want what’s happening now any more than I want the sphere locked away.  The genie’s out of the bottle, and we can’t wrestle the cork back in, even if we never touch the sphere again.  All of these precautions – it’s only a matter of time.”

            Colonel Merriwether shook his head in turn.  He wanted to be angry, but that seemed, suddenly, like too much effort.  “Then my victory is pyrrhic.  You won.”

            Cardice paused by her car and looked south, towards where the canister was being loaded onto a remotely driven truck by robots.  When she answered, it was without looking towards Merriwether.  “No.  We both lost.”  She drove away without another word.

            “There is no doubt,” Terestat declared after a tense calculation.  “The prison’s motion altered suddenly and drastically, enough to produce a spacetime ripple through the blackbody surface.”

            Eshervat considered this.  “You’re saying we stopped?”

            “Yes, Spacemaster.”

            An ecstatic bolt of electricity launched from Eshervat’s snout and grounded itself on the prow.  “Then it worked!”

            Terestat’s sparks were more muted.  “This was only phase one, you will recall.  There is still the much more difficult matter of opening the sphere.”

            “Unless someone opens it for us,” Eshervat noted.

            Terestat’s subatomic vibrator worked incoherently for a moment.  “Words do not exist to describe how infinitesimally small the probability of that occurrence is.”

            Eshervat’s fourth eyelid glittered.  “Those are my kind of odds.”

Thank you for reading Lloyd Earickson’s short story, Ship in a Bottle, an IGC Publishing original story. If you enjoyed the story, please consider leaving a comment or review in the discussion below the story. Be sure to follow IGCPublishing.com for updates, more information, and other freely available stories.

If you want to know more about the writing process for this story and how it came to be, please read the author’s note and release post.

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