ΔV Pt. 01

He fumbled around with his gloves and found one of the many contact points and clung to the ship – his crew did likewise, and he knew that it was a grim chance. If the People's Shield did any maneuvering, they would be cast aside like so many bits of confetti. But the Shield didn't maneuver as the light faded. It seemed the rest of the crew was just as shocked – and soon, the crew were informed they could enter without the risk of being cast to the void.

The rest of the day was passed, as astros did, as sailors had done before them, as warriors of tribes had done before them, in rumor mongering. Qasim was asked many times by other shifts as he laid in his bunk and thought of home. He was asked by Lei if he knew which enemy had fired the nukes. What nuke? The nuke that the glorious point defense grid of their very fine ship had shot down. Qasim, knowing that any sarcasm might be whispered to Colonel Yating and logged in his immense files, had simply said: "I did not see any lasers. But they are invisible, so, who is to say."

Ning, the woman who often was assigned to managing the nuclear control rods when the officer in charge of managing the nuclear control rods was asleep, suggested that it was an experimental weapon fired by the Americans. The fact there was no American ship within five AU of their ship had nothing at all on her conviction: "After all," she said, nodding sagely, her arms crossed before her skinny chest. "That is what makes it such a secretive weapon, yes? If it can be fired from far away, accurately."

Jun Ling, a spacer second class, who was remarkable for both failing his officer exams and having an exceptionally annoying laugh, had cut in with a snide: "Any weapon that could fire further than a few dozen kilometers would be so huge and obvious that we'd have seen it."

"Not if it was hidden underground," Ning said.

"If it was hidden underground and could fire this far, it'd set the Earth's atmosphere on fire with the friction as it passed," Jun Ling had said. Then he had let out his astoundingly annoying laugh.

Ning, bristling: "It could have been on Mars! Then it would have been closer, and thus, easier to build."

That had brought some nods and murmuring. But then Zheng, a spacer first class whose spotless record and prestigious career on three other ships – including the Qeng Ho – had gotten him a position on the bridge as one of the support enlisted, arrived. Zheng was immediately in a constellation of other spacers, many of them tucked against the walls, the ceilings, others nestled into their bunks. Qasim, who was as comfortable as he could reasonably manage in the eternal weightlessness of the ship, remained where he was.

"I saw the telescopic reports," Zheng said, his voice serious. "Janus is gone."

"The moon?"

"No, the god, you moron," Jun Ling said, then let out the laugh.

Someone is going to airlock him eventually, Qasim thought.

"The moon," Zheng said, nodding.

"What could blow up an entire moon?" Ning whispered.

"There was an Indian research station there, right?" One of the other spacers whispered. Qasim had known several members of the PLAA who had a deep, abiding resentment of the Indians over their claim to the Kashmir region. They were a minority: Most of the Chinese resentment was focused on Russia followed shortly by the Americans, for both had stymied their goals in the outer system. But before any more discussion could be held, an alert rang out and the call came: All hands to burn stations. The spacers that filled the bunk room scrambled, pushed, and were dragged by helpful comrades into their bunks. Qasim, having never left his bunk, felt quite pleased with not needing to get up, move, or do anything. Instead, he laid back and closed his eyes and enjoyed the pressure of the ship's engines as they began to accelerate.

His pleasure in the momentary return of gravity – or at least, a kind of gravity – was broken by the doleful knowledge that they were heading for Janus. Or what had been Janus.

Qasim would have been proud of his prediction, three days later, when he and the rest of the enlisted crew were gathered into the massive cargo hold that ran along the 'belly' of the ship. They were organized in a rough, grid shape – possibly only thanks to the microgravity they were in. The officers that floated across from them looked sharp and professional and beady eyed. There was the Captain, Zhao, and her bridge crew. Zhao was a grizzled woman with a jagged scar and a proesthetic arm – a present from a railgun slug that had shot through her old ship at a significant velocity.

"We are in a stable orbit within five hundred kilometers of what was the moon Janus. Our observations have been sent to Command and their order is that we are to take a closer look. I shall let our astrogation officer explain," she said, then nodded to the astrogation officer. Qasim didn't know his name, but he didn't trust him. He looked far too excited to be trustworthy.

"It seems, ah, that the Indians have been attempting some exotic research," the astrogation officer said. "Whatever they were trying to do, the end result is...is quite fascinating. According to the preliminary scans and the probe missile we have fired at the anomaly-" That word made Qasim purse his lip. "-what has happened is unprecedented. Despite the complete destruction of Janus, there is not a single piece of debris left in orbit around Saturn. What is more, the moon's gravitational field is still present and impacting the other moons in the Saturnian system. Despite the moon's physical mass being gone, the mass is...still there." He looked at the crew, as if expecting to see an excited reaction.

Qasim didn't risk glancing at the others. But he was just feeling more and more concerned about why they were being told this.

The astrogation officer coughed after the silence and continued. "Our telescopes have seen that in the place of Janus, there is a sphere of energy, roughly five hundred meters wide. We have launched a pair of drones to either side of the anomoly, allowing us to get a fuller observation of it. This has also revealed a remarkable, ah, effect." He nodded. "When the second drone's communication beam was eclipsed by the anomaly, it stopped returning to the ship."

The astrogation officer smiled. "Further examination made it clear. The anomaly...is a portal."

"Command's orders are clear," Captain Zhao said. "We are to be humanity's leader through the portal. We are ordered to send an officer and a crew of enlisted men through in the ship's secondary shuttle."

Qasim was already sighing.

A good thing, too.

He was the third man volunteered.

The ship's shuttle was a short ranged vehicle, primarily used to transport marines to a surrendered ship or to transport supplies from a planetary base to the ship proper – when port facilities weren't available. The PLAA took some pride in how heavily armed their shuttles were: Qasim was assigned to the turret on the belly, which was loaded with a conventional machine gun with a caliber sufficiently high to make it an anti-vehicle weapon and not an anti-personal weapon. Qasim considered this as the officer in charge of the shuttle – the peppy, excited astrogation officer (who had volunteered, of course) guided them out of the shuttle bay. The engines burped once or twice, thrusting only a short time to send them sailing smoothly, slowly towards the portal.

He supposed that he should have been excited – but it felt so...unreal.

A portal?

To where? He couldn't even imagine where. He had never watched any of the vid shows that were about space – he had been in space before he had ever gotten interested in space. And his interest had only been to get himself away from the planting, cutting, burying. To now be falling to a portal was subsumed into the duty he had foisted on him. He checked the gun's swivel rate and made sure that the dead man's switch that he was holding was actually activated.

If the alert came, he would release the switch and the computer would fire the guns.

Quite a responsibility.

There was one advantage to his position in the turret: He was able to look through the gun sights at the portal as they came closer. And that sparked a long desiccated husky part of Qasim's soul. Eyes that looked at Saturn and her rings and saw garish colors, that looked at the vastness of the space and saw nothing but little dots, that looked at his ship and saw nothing but chores...looked at the portal and saw wonder.

The portal was nearly invisible at first – until the plane of Saturn cut across it. Where the ocher and the yellow of the gas giant met the edge of the portal, its midnight black sphere shape could be seen. Light warped and distorted at the seam of that sphere, edging and warping the view of Saturn, making it look as if the whole world was being spun to pieces.

Qasim gulped.

The shuttle came within five hundred kilometers of the portal and directed one of the nearly invisible drones to fly into it. The dart of metal vanished – and the astrogation officer breathed a slow sigh of relief. His nervous voice filled the shuttle: "We're still getting telemetry. The drone wasn't destroyed." He chuckled. "Through the breach, men."

Qasim tightened his grip on the dead man switch.

The shuttle approached with another light puff of reaction mass. They sailed closer. The portal swelled.

It had started as the size of a football.

Now it was the size of a car.

Now, the size of a mountain.

It filled Qasim's gun sighted. The urge came to him, the urge to release the dead man switch and pepper the impossible thing with Teflon coated armor piercing machine gun rounds. Instead, he gripped his weapon tighter.

The portal grew larger still.

There was a moment of chill.

Qasim opened his eyes. He barely knew he had closed them. When he looked through the gun sights, he saw...

The brilliant sweep of Saturn's rings. The ocher and yellow of Saturn herself. They had gone nowhere. Nowhere at all.

The astrogation officer swore: "Oh my mother..." He paused. "The People's Shield is gone."

Silence reigned within the shuttle as the floated away from the portal.

Qasim sighed. "So, we're dead?" he asked, his brow furrowing. He badly wished he had some kind of cigarette.

"No, no, no!" The astrogation officer said, excitement climbing. "Flip and take us right back through the portal!" He said, and the spacer assigned to the helm stated to work. Acceleration pressed Qasim into his seat and he stolidly waited to see what would come next. The shuttle's nose swung to face the portal. Once more, they started to accelerate – and once more the sweep of chill rushed along Qasim's body. He shuddered – and then the astrogation officer cried out. "There she is!"

"Shuttle, report," a voice cracked over the communication system. "What is the other system like?"

"We...it...appears to be identical to our own, sir," the astrogation officer said, his voice trembling. "We got preliminary data from the shuttle cameras. It will take some time to decipher them, but-"

"Understood," the Captain's voice cut into the PA. "You are to return through the portal and to gather more data until you have hit the halfway point on your life support. Understood?"

"Aye, sir!" The astrogation officer said.

And, just like that, what had been miraculous became mundane. By the third time that Qasim had entered the portal, he had already relegated it to the same place he kept 'going through airlocks' and 'manipulating electronics.' It was another door to use. And for the entire twelve hours that the shuttle spent, gathering data with their telescopes and cameras, he saw nothing beyond the door worth the time spent getting to it.

But...

Then again, what else was new for Qasim?