146: VAULT

Going through the cargo door leadsto a small room ending in another cargo door. This room has two more guards in it, meaning that 1.5% of the entire population of Hylara are occupied just guarding the few halls and rooms we’d walked through. There’s no way that this is normal. Perhaps the increased guard is a response to us landing, or maybe Hive’s stunt.

The room is largely empty, except for the guards, some chairs, and a table with some snacks on it. On either side of the cargo door at the far end are some big, transparent windows, looking into what I assume is the room that the guards are stationed to guard. We’re beckoned over to the windows.

I have a pretty reasonable sense of direction, and following the curves and corners of the hallways and rooms we’ve walked through, I think we might have looped back around at some point and are now near the nursery again, meaning that the room-sized box in the cavern we’re overlooking is probably pretty close to the repurposed ship. It might even be attached to it; I have no real idea how large the ship had been. Wherever we are, the box is huge, made of something white (a ceramic, maybe?) and has, in its own side, a cargo door, through which a handful of Hylarans are moving big metal crates on motorised carts. The crates they’re moving are bare metal with bright yellow painted latches.

“What are they moving?” Tinera asks.

Max shrugs. “That’s the Materials Port Supervisor’s problem. Watch.”

They fill up the vault and close the cargo doors. Warning lights and sirens begin to flash in the room; judging by the lack of panic in there, I suppose that they’re expected. After several minutes, when we’ve all started to fidget, everything dies back down, and the workers open the vault and begin to wheel the crates out again.

The crates they wheel out have red painted latches, not yellow ones.

“Materials exchange,” Max explains. “Antarctica trades goods with us via the Vault.”

“Hmm,” I say. “Yeah. That’s not real.”

Tinera cocks her head. “It does explain rather a lot. And we just saw it happen.”

“We saw some people load and unload a room! Max here is trying to convince us that teleportation is real!”

“Time manipulation is real,” Captian Klees points out. “We can slow down time eighty times.”

“That’s just chronostasis! That’s different; that’s perfectly normal physics! That,” I point through the window at the Vault, “is magic! No. No thank you.” I turn and storm off; nobody stops me.

I don’t go far. It would be incredibly embarrassing to get lost down here. I walk back through a few rooms and stop to stare blankly at a machine stretching some kind of semiliquid plastic into a long iridescent sheet that looks like the Hylaran tunic fabric. It looks like making the stuff is a fairly long process.

Captain Klees comes up beside me. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. But this is some bullshit.”

He shrugs. “I’m genetically engineered for potential agelessness in preparation for being part of an electronic hivemind in an interstellar spacecraft. I gave up being surprised by bullshit a long time ago.”

“I know, I know. But teleportation?”

“You have been saying the whole time, that this colony doesn’t make any sense if it isn’t part of a trade network.”

“I know.”

“Any particular reason you hate teleportation technology in particular?”

“I don’t hate it, it’s just ridiculous.”

“More ridiculous than everything else?”

“It’s just…” I sigh. “We went through so much. Years on that spaceship. Death around every corner. We lost so many people. We got all the way out here, with Earth sixty five entire light years away, and suddenly they’re like, Surprise! Earth is right here! We brought it with us, right through this fucking vault! It was waiting for you at the end of your journey the entire fucking time!” I shake my head. “I don’t know. I’m being stupid. But for the record, this still doesn’t make sense. There’s no way that there’s anything out here to trade that’s worth the cost and risk and time of establishing a colony for. This planet can’t have anything that can’t be mined or synthesised closer to home. And even if it somehow did, how would they have known about it back on Earth, to establish this?”

“Maybe the alien spider queen contacted Earth with a trade proposal,” he suggests, and we both start giggling.

“Even then,” I say. “They sent javelins to so many exoplanets. They can’t all have alien spider queens willing to build trade networks.”

“Nah, only we have the spider queen. The others were all decoys. To stop anyone else from noticing in time to establish the trade network first.”

We head back just in time to hear Tal saying, “So there’s no aliens on the planet at all? Are you sure?”

“We can never be sure,” Max says. “We haven’t surveyed most of it. But we’ve never found alien life, no. The Vault is human tech, Antarctic tech – really old tech, now, about a century and a half. But they still have a monopoly on it, so far as I know, due to its rather serious limitations.”

“What kind of limitations?” Captain Klees asks.

“Mass, for one. You send stuff both ways at once, and you want the masses to be as equal as possible. Even a slight mass discrepancy makes the transport cost a ridiculous amount of energy; half the bother with using the thing is calculating mass as perfectly as possible. Then there’s the materials. The Vault can sent some things intact, and some things it can’t. It’s really good with very simple materials that we can remould on-site; fantastic for metals and water, workable for plastics and vitamins and carbohydrates. Anything chemically or structurally complicated is… problematic. Dome canvasses tend to show up with flaws and weak points, for example. And there’s no hope of getting life through, of course; not a person, not a frozen bacterial culture, not a dried mold spore. Even viruses get minced up in transit.”

“So the only life on this planet is what your ship brought.”

“And what yours brought. But the biggest limitation is distance.”

“We’re at a pretty big distance from Earth.”

“Exactly. Early teleportation experiments, when they worked at all, were so ridiculously expensive in terms of energy usage as to have no practical effect. There are very few situations in which it’s more economical to use a power station’s worth of energy to transport a few molecules from one place to another, than to simply carry those molecules, even taking into account the uses in espionage and suchlike. What Antarctica discovered was that there was a relationship between distance transported and energy cost that, at least at first, is inverse – the further away you are, the less energy it takes. Once you reach a threshhold, the energy costs start to increase again. Sending matter within the solar system isn’t worth the energy, but if you move outside it, and keep going… well. The ‘sweet spot’, in terms of energy usage, is a distance of between sixty and ninety light years. Once they figured this out, Antarctica put all their effort into exoplanet imaging and created the Kleiner array.”

“Why, though?” I ask. “Even with the ability to transport goods back, what could be out here that’s possibly worth the cost – ” but then I stop myself. Nothing about this suggests that they were looking for anything specific on the exoplanets. And a trade route isn’t just about the goods. There are two important factors to a trade route – the source of goods, and the route itself.

“Where can you send things with that? Does it have to be a specific place?”

Max nods. “The Vault is two vaults. We can sent and receive to two locations. A space station around Mars and a settlement on Venus.”

That has some dramatic and potentially horrifying implications for how things have changed around Earth in the last century, but that’s hardly my problem. “And how expensive is the Vault to use, in terms of energy?”

“If you were really, really careful with getting perfect mass equivalency, it would be essentially free. We’re usually some micrograms off, which means some cost.”

“Costs on the scale of the costs of transporting things through normal space?” Tinera asks, but we already know the answer. Venus to Mars orbit is a very long journey involving escaping a gravity well.

“I’m not a physicist,” Max shrugs.

“They sent out forty three javelins,” Captain Klees says. “Do we know how many made it?”

“There are seven active sites with Vaults like this one,” Max says. “Five of them were resupplied with javelins. Six, now that you’re here.”

Six out of forty three. That’s a lot lower than I’d hoped. I tell myself that it’s possible that most of the javelins made it, found and disabled the sabotage systems that would kill them if the Vault colonies hadn’t been set up, and settled happily on their planets, out of contact with the rest of us due to the vast time and space involved. That’s possible.

“A transport chain with six hops,” Captain Klees says. “Six places on or around Earth that Antarctica can send materials for free on extremely short notice. How big of a deal is that?”

“Economically? The biggest deal possible,” Tinera says. “Antarctica can dominate any market possible, anywhere in civilisation, with that, so long as said market is in something that can be transported with these.”

“Can they transport information?” Tal asks.

“Yes,” Max says. “Printed paper, no problem. Certain old, large methods of storage that can be read digitally, sure. Electronically stored data, no.”

“That’s easy to work around,” Tal says. “If you could get your data to one of the Vaults in this chain, you can send it anywhere that another one’s set up, completely uninterceptable.”

“The cost of transporting mined materials is – was, when I was there – the biggest profit limitation in lunar mining,” Tinera says. “This changes the game. Can you imagine mining the asteroid belt for metals and sending it all back to Earth with absolutely no transport cost?”

“Traditionally,” I say, “travel and transport are the major limiting factors in establishing empires. A monopoly on something like this is…” I shake my head.

“How would they still have a monopoly after a century and a half, though?” Tal asks. “Tech is tech. It doesn’t stay secret for long.”

“The tech itself might not be the main factor in that,” the Friend points out, “if using it involves establishing a colony decades of light years away. If Antarctica revealed this tech immediately after these Vaults were actually established and tested, and any competitors got their hands on the tech immediately, they still wouldn’t have had time to establish an alternate chain.”

“Unless their space travel tech has also improved,” Tinera points out.

“Which is likely,” the Friend agrees. “But assuming the speed of light is still a barrier, they wouldn’t have much time to do it. And what would be the point? It’d be far simpler and safer to buy or treaty their way into using Antarctica’s chain.”

The speed of light clearly isn’t a barrier for the Vault, so I don’t feel too confident in just assuming it’s a barrier for everything else any more, but I’m not interested in speculating about travel technology right now. I stay silent.

At least a lot of mysteries have been solved with this. The lack of some materials and enormous abundance of others makes sense. Something like this could send aluminium panels for walls, send big blocks of soap to be hand-cut, and leave a lack of high integrity dome canvas.

And a lack of life.

“You don’t have farms, do you?” I ask. “Your only food source is the Vault.”

Max nods. “The algal farms that the ship brought failed early on. We have plenty of microbes, but none of them are photosynthetic. Attempts to create something to consume heat off the generators directly have all failed. It’s just us and the Vault.”

And a widespread cultural fear of accepting the Courageous’ help. And a devastating famine.

I look over the tense, cautious faces of the Hylarans in the room with us, tamp down the fury rising inside me in response to some very dark suspicions, and set my jaw. “You should tell us, I think, about the history of this colony.”