Death's End

Yifan helped Cheng Xin put on her helmet. Her body was almost frozen. He turned on the oxygen and the heater in her suit, and she felt herself thawing out. Yifan now turned to put on his own suit. He worked fast, but it took some work between when he put on his helmet and the two suits could be connected for communications. Neither was able to speak until their chilled bodies had recovered.

The suits were so heavy and clumsy that Cheng Xin could imagine how difficult it would be to move around in them under 1G. Her suit wasn’t so much a suit as a house, the only place where she could find refuge. The light-emitting strip drifting in the cabin was dimming, so Yifan turned on the lamp on his own suit. Inside the cramped space, Cheng Xin thought they were like ancient miners trapped underground.

“What happened?” Cheng Xin asked.

Yifan floated up from his seat and struggled until he managed to open the screen over one of the portholes—the automatic controls for the porthole screens were also nonfunctional. He drifted to the other side of the cabin and repeated the operation with another porthole.

Cheng Xin looked at the transformed universe outside.

She saw two star clusters at the two ends of space: The cluster in front glowed blue and the cluster behind glowed red. Cheng Xin had seen a similar sight earlier when Halo was flying at lightspeed, but the two star clusters she saw now were not stable. Their shapes shifted abruptly like two balls of flame in fierce wind. Instead of stars leaping from the blue cluster into the red cluster from time to time, two light belts connected the two ends of the universe, only one of which was visible on each side of the ship.

The wider belt took up half the space on one side. Its two ends were not connected to the blue and red star clusters; instead, the belt ended in two round tips. Cheng Xin could tell that this “belt” was actually an extremely flattened oval—or perhaps a circle that had been stretched out. Colored patches of various sizes flitted across the wide belt: blue, white, and light yellow. Instinctively, Cheng Xin understood that she was looking at Planet Blue.

The light belt on the other side of the ship was thinner but brighter, and its surface showed no details. Unlike Planet Blue, this belt’s length cycled rapidly between a bright line that connected the red and blue clusters, and a bright circle. The belt’s periodic circular state told Cheng Xin that she was looking at the star DX3906.

“We’re orbiting Planet Blue at lightspeed,” said Guan Yifan. “Except the speed of light is now very slow.”

The shuttle had been moving far faster, but as the speed of light was an absolute speed limit, the shuttle’s velocity had been cut down to that.

“The death lines ruptured?”

“Yes. They spread out to cover the entire solar system. We’re trapped here.”

“Was it due to the disturbance from Tianming’s ship?”

“Perhaps. He didn’t know the death lines were here.”

Cheng Xin didn’t want to ask what their next step was, knowing that nothing more could be done. No computer could operate when the speed of light was below twenty kilometers per second. The shuttle’s AI and control systems were all dead. Under such conditions, not even a light inside the spacecraft could be turned on—it was just a metal can with no electricity or power. Hunter was the same, also dead. Before falling into reduced lightspeed, the shuttle had not yet began decelerating, and so the small spaceship should be nearby—but it might as well be on the other side of the planet. Without the control systems, neither the shuttle nor Hunter could open their doors.

Cheng Xin thought about Yun Tianming and 艾 AA. They were both on the ground, and should be safe. But now there was no way for the two sides to communicate. She never even got to say hello to him.

Something light gently struck the visor of her helmet: the metal bottle. Cheng Xin looked at the ancient pressure gauge on it again, and touched her own space suit. Hope, once extinguished, lit up again like a firefly.

“You’ve been preparing for situations like this?” she asked.

“Yes.” Yifan’s voice sounded distorted in Cheng Xin’s earpiece due to the use of ancient analog signals. “Not for ruptured death lines, of course, but we were prepared for accidentally drifting into the trails of lightspeed ships. The situations are similar: The reduced lightspeed stops everything…. Next, we need to start the neurons.”

“What?”

“Neural computers. Computers that can operate under reduced lightspeed. The shuttle and Hunter both have two control systems, one of which is based on neural computers.”

Cheng Xin was amazed that such machines existed.