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Warhammer 20,000 – The Tears of Athena

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(Introduction – There’s a thread about what other eras the Black Library should cover and some discussion of the Dark Age of Technology. Which got me thinking about the potential of analytical, scientific explorers in the mold of Asimov’s stories or Star Trek first running into the madness of Chaos and the horrors to come.
So here it is.)

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The ISRO Rajpatti Devi broke into real-space around midnight on New Year’s Day, year of our Lord 20,000 AD.

Captain Singh chuckled at the significance of the date as his cybernetic implants informed him. No doubt there were celebrations somewhere on some colony in the human diaspora or maybe even in some of the hives that covered the spoiled homeworld of Earth, but onboard the Rajpati Devi it was 11,325.24 Era Stellar, dating from the launch of Earth’s first faster-than-light vessel. ES has been the standard calendar for star farers almost from the beginning, a system based on galactic rotation and universal principals rather than arbitrary revolutions of the motherworld and the calculations of a long-dead priest king.

Still he tagged the bit of trivia for his daily message to the crew. Some might find amusement in it.

Captain Singh looked down at the prow of his ship. The Rajpatti Devi was nearly five kilometers long, with a hull like a graceful kirpan cutting through the void. The first two-thirds of the ship were a flat blade, almost uninhabited, occupied with navigational equipment, field generators and mundane storage holds, the hull decorated with the ship’s seal. Behind this a small city of slim towers rose from the flat of the blade and from them hung the star gardens. This rear third of the ship was enclosed in an atmospheric sheath allowing the crew to walk beneath the stars as if they were on a world. To port and starboard were two flanges, like the guard of a sword, each holding the launch and landing bays for the ship’s small fleet of secondary craft. Below the star gardens and towers, a reversed steel mountain descended from the hull of the ship, housing the plasma reactor and the drive units that pushed the Rajpatti through space. It was a design that was both practical and elegant, one that had been tested and proven over 5000 stellar years of service from one side of the Milky Way to the other. It could not only handle the most adverse conditions encountered in space, but formed a warm and welcoming home for the brave individuals who left their homes to challenge the unknown.

Aboard the ship were over 300 scientists and scholars attended by countess AI systems running everything from the food fabricators in the lounges to the multiple force fields holding the ship together. The Rajpatti Devi was a city, a community, a university and more. A beacon of the eternal curiosity and spirt of humanity shinning in the void.

Before the Rajpatti’s pointed prow was the star Chinchare Delta-4. It had been an otherwise unremarkable yellow dwarf star but was suddenly showing signs of decaying into a supernova millions of years before its time. The explosion could happen as soon as a few millennia from now. The anomaly was sufficiently interesting to be worthy of the notice of a team of scientists and an Athena-class explorer like the ISRO Rajpati Devi.

Captain Singh imagined he could feel a shudder in the deck and the Rajpati shed several constellations of probes and drones to explore and fully map the star system. The basics – five solid inner planets and eight outer gas giants, plus dozens of dwarf planets and hundreds of satellites and asteroids – were well known, but this was a chance to fill in the specifics. This mission was a rare and valuable chance to expand humanity’s understanding of the Chinchare sector. The sector was part of the buffer between human space and the Al’Dhar Exclusion Zone. The enigmatic and ancient alien race had long made it clear that humanity was not welcome in, or even near, their worlds and the Rajpati had to tread carefully. Captain Singh looked upwards through the force field in his private tower, as if he could catch sight of the alien empire, just a few dozen light years away. Humanity and the Al’Dhar had managed a tense detente for over a thousand years and he assumed his minor mission would not strain it.

Of course if it did, the Rajpati’s batteries of gravitonic weapons would remind the ancient ones that humanity was a rising power, not children to be reprimanded.

Singh dismissed the thought. It was beneath him. He was a scientist and an explorer, not some savage from Earth’s backwards past.

Still, looking up at Al’Dhar Space he felt irritation. He knew it should not have bothered him but it did. There were more than three hundred billion stars in this galaxy alone, why should it bother him that a small segment of them were off limits? Perhaps it was just the arrogance of the Al’Dhar, deciding where humanity may or may not go. Hoarding their knowledge like misers. Didn’t they know that knowledge shared would multiply and bring back even more? How had these ancients progressed without understanding such a basic principle?

The Al’Dhar were not only race that rivaled the Children of Earth. The Morgorks were savage and relentless but with their primitive technology they were easily contained. There were the ancient ruins of the Tomb-Builders found across the galaxy. But no one else even came close. Al’Dhar artifacts and even still-thriving colonies had been found across the galaxy, but for some reason the vast majority of the Al’Dhar had retreated to their own quarter of space millions of years ago and declared it off-limits to any other civilization.

With one last look at the forbidden stars, Captain Singh turned and stepped into the null-grav chute letting his momentum carry him downwards towards the conference room. Unlike many other void-farers Captain Singh had grown up on a planet, and valued physical contact and meetings over impersonal exchanges of data. So he required his senior staff to meet in person each cycle and actually speak to one another. Initially there had been irritation and resistance but he believed the team now saw the benefits for collaboration and networking beyond electronic tendrils and data packets. Now if he could just convince some of them to join him for a game of cricket in his patch of the star garden…

Episode 2

“OK, here I am.” Said Captain Singh. “Now why are we here?”

He took a seat, a comfortable padded chair floating a half meter off the deck. He was in one of the chemistry labs and joined by Doctor Banerjee, head of the scientific portion of the mission. Eck-Panch, the ship’s head of engineering, was their host. Dr. Neha Banerjee was a handsome woman approaching her third century and head of the Stellar Observatory at the New Mumbai Institute of Astrophysics. It was her fifth or sixth deep-space mission and the second one she’d led. She’d discovered the anomalies in the star, she’d petitioned ISRO for the ship and she was determined that the mission be a success.

Eck-Panch however barely cared. He (not that gender mattered much for a creature like him) was a vat-grown body interfaced with several of the higher-order Artificial Intelligences on the ship. He was over two meters tall with long with thin limbs. Around him twitched several tendrils for times when a physical contact with machines was needed, a holdover from earlier days of hardwired interfaces. The affectation was still in fashion for hybrids, particularly for those from the shipyards of Mangal Grah. As the name implied, he was the fifth such body grown for the ship. Thus he could be called only a few decades old, or nearly a millennia, depending on whether you counted his body or his minds. Some days he gave the impression that as far as he was concerned Dr. Banerjee and even Captain Singh were just passengers on his ship. Or more properly, passengers in his belly, since in many ways he was the ship.

Seeing the two of them voluntarily together was a bit of a surprise for Singh, just a few cycles ago they had been feuding via data-packet over just how close to the star the ISRO Rajpatti Devi could safely go. Singh braced himself for a continuation of the conflict, perhaps with Banerjee trying to take advantage of the captain’s fondness for in-person talks over electronic messages.

“There have been some anomalies.” Eck-Panch said, his voice flat and calm.

“Malfunctions.” Banerjee corrected.

“Probes losing contact briefly, probes out of position, indecipherable data. An unacceptable level of errors.”

“We’ve noticed some flawed data coming back. I already said several times-” Banerjee began. But Eck-Panch steamrolled over her.
“So my subordinate AIs and I performed a simple experiment, having each probe calculate the square root of two to the ten-millionth digit. The results were…” Singh had never seen Eck-Panch pause before, how could the gestalt consciousness of dozens of AIs be at a loss for words? “…concerning. There were, on average, five errors per calculation.”

“Five errors?” Captain Singh asked in disbelief. “Five in ten million? That means…” Now Singh could see why Eck-Panch was at a loss for words.

“Moreover there were inconsistencies among several AIs onboard the Rajpatti Devi as well.”

“But that would mean…”

“I cannot speculate what that means.”

“I have a guess. Sabotage. The Merikins or their Daiwa lapdogs. They’ve been trying to get us out of this sector for centuries.” Banerjee interjected.

“There is no evidence-“ Eck-Panch began but Sing quieted him with a gesture.

“This is very concerning.” Singh said. A ship as complex as the Rajpatti Devi relied on billions of calculations per second to operate. An error, even as small, as this could lead to disaster.

“There is more. The average number of errors increased by two standard deviations for the probes on the far side of the sun.”

“The ones closer to the Al’Dhar Exclusion Zone.” Singh provided.

“I decline to speculate.”

Captain Singh nodded, but continued to speculate anyway.

“Alerted to the problem, I conducted several million diagnostics on the ship. Before I transmit the detailed results however, I felt a practical demonstration might be in order.” Eck-Panch gestured toward two beakers of water. Heating elements activated under them and two digital temperature displays appeared.
“I don’t see what-“ Banerjee began but Singh silenced her again.

The temperature readings continued to rise. As the two beakers boiled, Singh looked at the temperature displays and blinked. He blinked again.

The one on the left showed 100.00000034 degrees. The one on the right 99.99999993.

“I-impossible!” He jumped to his feet as if to examine the beakers himself. Temperature sensors in his eyes confirmed the readings.

“I am transmitting the results of approximately 47 thousand similar experiments I have conducted in the last few hours.” Eck-Panch explained. “The difference varied from experiment to experiment but was present in the vast majority. I am relieved this one showed a variance for your inspection.”

Captain Singh and Doctor Banerjee’s artificial eyes turned silver for a few seconds as they devoted internal resources to analyzing the data.

“M-misaligned sensors, differences in atmospheric pressure, computer errors, there has to be an explanation.” Dr. Banerjee began.

“I am transmitting my analysis and projections now. Either there is a large and growing number of malfunctions throughout the ship, or…” Eck-Panch paused. Captain Singh felt a touch of fear. He had never known Eck-Panch to hesitate before. Now he’d seen it twice. “Pardon. Or, the two beakers boiled at different temperatures.”

“That would mean that basic, fundamental scientific principles, are…” Singh groped for a word sufficient to convey his horror. “…variable!”

The word did not do the job.

“And if something this simple is varying, then the atmospheric sheath, the gravity fields, fabricators, life support, the plasma reactors…” Singh muttered as his mind calculated hundreds of doomsday scenarios. He paused to skim the top one hundred.

“We’re leaving.” He declared.

Dr. Banerjee opened her mouth but though better of speaking. Her own internal calculations were coming to the same conclusion.

Captain Singh closed his eyes and began issuing orders, thousands of commands to different sections of the ship. AIs were to be arranged in groups of five, each AI checking the calculations of others. Non-essential systems were to be scaled back or shut down entirely. He started backing up his own memories to the ship’s Memorial Systems and recommended that crew start doing the same daily. And he had the bridge set course for the jump point back to human space.

Nearly a minute later he opened his eyes and turned to Dr. Banerjee. “Well this is great news for your team.”

“Great news? How? Thanks to these… anomalies all our data is unreliable, we’re running away, abandoning decades of work, ISRO will never approve another mission and-“

“And instead of mere supernova, a phenomena studied countless times before, you instead have found a breakdown in the fundamental laws of the universe. I daresay this could be the most important discovery in centuries. Just explaining those two beakers would be worth the Daystrom Prize, and explaining the anomalies… it could change everything we know about the nature of the universe.”

“I…” Dr. Banerjee’s internals started generating theories by the thousand and formulating experiments to test them. She had to shut down the system that was already writing her Daystrom acceptance speech.

“It’s hard to be sure what ISRO will do, but I know that if it was up to me, I’d deploy a dozen or more ships around this system and flood it with probes. And surely the only scientist with first-hand experience would be the natural choice to head the study. Yes Dr. Banerjee, you have quite a time ahead of you.

With those brave words Captain Singh turned and headed for the bridge. His internal systems released another dose of endorphins in a desperate effort to stem the rising panic in his gut. A five-kilometer long ship relying on billions of calculations a second. They’d be lucky to get out alive.