Tag: Analog

Minerva Girls by James Van Pelt

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Minerva Girls by James Van Pelt (Analog, September/October 2020) starts with three precocious fourteen year old girls planning a trip to the Moon. Throughout the construction of their ship (or rather the adaptation of a gas station storage tank with insulation and an anti-gravity drive), Penny the narrator goes to summer school. As she struggles to master her geography lessons—a list of states, etc.—we see her situation in school, i.e. the tribalism, bullying, pettiness, and so on. When Penny isn’t in class, or hanging out with Jacqueline and Selena, she works in her (presumably widowed) father’s scrap yard, where she sources the parts needed for the ship.
About half way through the story a ticking clock is introduced in the form of Selena and Jacqueline’s parents plans to move away, and the trio rush to test the anti-gravity drive:

By the time we’d solidified the anchors and rigged the power source, the eastern sky had lightened.
We crowded into the crane’s control booth fifty yards from our test site. Selena connected the video game joystick to the wires that ran to the Distortion Drive. She held it out to Jacqueline. “You should do the honors.”
I had my phone out to film our results.
I guess I thought the Distortion Drive would rise up from the golf cart trailer until the cables stopped its progress. That, or it wouldn’t move, which seemed more possible. I steadied the phone and turned on the video.
Jacqueline took a deep breath, then pushed the joystick forward a tick.
I lurched against the glass, as if someone had tipped the control booth from behind. Selena squeaked and caught herself from falling.
Jacqueline bumped her head on the window. Then the control booth shifted back into place.
I said, “What happened?” while rubbing my shoulder.
“Dang,” said Jacqueline. “That’s going to leave a welt.” She sat on the control booth floor, her notebooks spilled around her.
“My machine!” Selena opened the door.
Jacqueline grabbed Selena’s leg. “Not yet.”
A clattering like hail rattled the control booth’s metal ceiling for a couple seconds. Gravel and marble-sized rocks bounced off the ground around the booth. My toolbox that I’d left next to the trailer slammed down along with the wrenches and other tools that had been in it.
“I hadn’t considered that,” said Jacqueline. “I’ll need to narrow the distortion field.”  p. 33

Eventually (spoiler) they set off on their trip, and Penny sees North America from orbit: now that the land isn’t an abstract shape on paper she can easily reel off the states and cities, and knows she’ll ace her geography test the next day. They continue on to the Moon.
I think I can see the attraction of this story, which is essentially a YA piece for teenage girls (although it harks back to the lone inventor trope it’s mostly about their personal tribulations). But I wonder if even that audience will manage to suspend disbelief at the thought of three fourteen-year-olds inventing a gravity drive and going to the moon.
I was also puzzled about the story’s appearance in Analog—I wouldn’t have though that the magazine’s readers would be interested in something like this but, surprisingly, it won the novelette section of the Anlab Awards for 2020. I suspect the (mainly) American readership like sentimental YA material more than I do.
** (Average). 8,300 words.

I, Bigfoot by Sarina Dorie

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I, Bigfoot by Sarina Dorie (Analog, September/October 2020) opens with a sasquatch called Bigfoot removing pictures of Jane Goodall (the actress who played Jane in Tarzan) from the tribe’s cave wall. As the females of the group ridicule him we learn that the pictures belonged to another male called Squeaker, who was banished by Old Grey Face for risking the tribe’s discovery by humans.
After brooding for a time Bigfoot goes out foraging, eventually ending up at a set of dumpsters. As he searches through the garbage for food he sees a magazine in the moonlight with what he thinks is a picture of Jane Goodall but, before he can examine it more closely, he hears a woman who is being chased by men. He jumps into in the dumpster to hide, and the woman joins him shortly afterwards. After a period she notices him, and at that point the story flashes back to Squeaker’s visit to a library—the one that got him banished—to hear Jane Goodall speak (this section is rather clumsily located at this dramatic point in the story).
Bigfoot eventually scares the men away and then, when she the teenage girl tells him she is a runaway, he takes her home. In return she tosses him a bag of things—which includes a tin opener to replace the one that was broken by the tribe, and without which they can’t open their store of canned food.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Bigfoot return to his tribe of sasquatches, where he is initially lauded for the goodies he has brought back. However, when Old Grey Face realises Bigfoot has been with a human his future looks in doubt—until one of the other males works out how to use the new-fangled can opener (Bigfoot failed), and then confesses that he learned from being near humans. Others join in with their confessions of proximity to humans and the subsequent argument splits the tribe in two.
This story has a rather unlikely premise but, if you can swallow the idea of hide-out sasquatches in the wilds around us, then it’s a pleasant enough read.
*** (Good). 8,750 words.

The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser

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The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser (Analog, September/October 2020) opens with two eight-tentacled creatures (we later learn they are evolved squids or octopuses) examining a human hip-bone discovered long after an far-future extinction event for humanity. The dominant one of the pair, Mottled-Brown (they communicate by skin colour changes) is worried about the prospect of his archaeological dig being shut down, and he is due to appear before the Ruling Octet who will decide whether or not this will be the case.
When Mottled Brown appears before the Octet his female nemesis, Blue-Ripples, is also there. During their testimony Blue Ripples states that—despite the human hip-bone Mottled-Brown has just found—his theories are ridiculous, and that the dig is a waste of resources and should be shut down. The Octet decide to have further debate and analysis the next day.
After the adjournment Blue-Ripples approaches Mottled-Brown and tells the archaeologist of her further plans for him:

“One fossil won’t save you,” Blue-ripples said. Her words were tinged with black. “And your conclusion is ridiculous. Two arms indeed.”
Mottled-Brown concentrated on keeping his skin a neutral gray-brown. He wouldn’t let her goad him into a confrontation again. “Well see the words tomorrow.”
He turned to leave, but Blue-Ripples stopped him. “I’ve filed a reproduction claim on you,” she said.
He froze in place, his arms writhing. He felt his skin turn black. “It’ll never be approved. I’m still at the height of my career.”
“And if the octet closes your dig?” Her words shifted blue. “A fossilized historical scientist with little hope of any further contribution? They’ll give you to me before your third heart can finish a beat.”
“Slug slime! My contributions have been—”
“In the past. The only thing you have left to contribute to the next generation is your flesh. Our eggs will grow strong on it.”
He involuntarily pulled himself into an upright fighting posture, an instinct remaining from the presentient past. “The Ruling Octet will see the value of my dig. History is on my side.”
“The writhing tentacles of history have slashed many of your kind,” she said. Her arms began slipping through the port and out of the hall. Her mantle flashed one last thought. “You will be delicious.”
As the last of her mantle slipped through the port, he saw her skin turn bright blue.  pp. 135-136

The rest of the story sees Mottled-Brown talk to his assistant Gray-Ring about the day’s events—and the sexual encounters of his youth. Then, the next day, he appears again in front of the Octet where (spoiler), in an extended debate, he manages to use Blue-Ripples’ own mathematical models against her to suggest that humans may have been tool users and are therefore worthy of further research.
Most of this piece is talking heads (in some respects it’s a bit like an Isaac Asimov story), but the clever debate and conversation between the various players is well done, and I found it an engaging read (having one of the characters threatening to lay their eggs in the other is a novel type of jeopardy!) The only thing that slightly spoiled this for me is the last section, where Mottled-Brown and his assistant Gray-Ring discuss the extinction events that caused the demise of the humans and the reptiles before them. The closing mention of an asteroid impact is obviously meant to mean something, but I couldn’t work out what the point of the comment was. The story is better than my final rating for the most part, and probably would have scored higher but for this.
*** (Good). 5,050 words.

Rover by A. T. Sayre

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Rover by A. T. Sayre (Analog, March-April 2020) opens with an AI rover prospecting on Mars: we learn that it hasn’t had any instructions from Earth for some considerable time and that it has been evolving during that period:

It had changed somewhat since its creation, as it had needed to take parts of other machinery left on Mars to keep going. A new wheel from the Russian probe, an optic lens to replace its own cracked one, a processor from another to subsidize its own when its performance had started to lag. It had taken solar panels from a Chinese machine with more receptive photovoltaic cells and mounted them alongside its original array to improve energy collection. It added another set of arms from an Indian rover, much better at gripping than its original four, connected by an extension of its chassis that it took from an American probe at the edge of the Northern ice cap.
And as always from the probes, landers, other rovers, it took the processors and data storage units, to keep pace with the increasing sophistication of its system. It grew smarter, more resourceful, capable of more and more complex problem solving and decision making. The rover had learned so much, had grown so much, it was barely recognizable as the simple machine that had touched down on the red planet so long ago.  pp. 171-172

While later traversing a ridge the rover falls over and damages a strut. After the vehicle reboots, it then decides to proceed to a location 90km away, where it hopes to find a replacement part on an abandoned vehicle. During this slow and arduous journey, the rover picks up a signal from what it thinks may be a human-manned ship and diverts course, but when the rover finally arrives at the site it finds a damaged ship and the body of one of the crew. The rover eventually manages to hoist itself up and into the vessel.
The last section of the story (spoiler) has the rover repair itself in the ship’s well-equipped workshop; it then contacts Earth, only to find that all Mars missions have been permanently suspended. Now that it is free to do as it wishes the rover converts itself into a drone, and the final scene sees it launch itself out of the ship to endlessly fly over the surface of Mars.
This is a well enough done piece, but I got the vague feeling that (for me, anyway) there was something missing. Maybe I just prefer stories where there is more focus on the personality of the AI.
*** (Good). 6,100 words.

The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen

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The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (Analog, September-October 2020)1 has as its protagonist a lab technician called Lucian, and who gets a request from a psychologist called Alice Marshall to make a wearable device for Leo Hawker, one of her patients: Hawker apparently sees a naked water nymph whenever he goes near bodies of water. Lucian subsequently constructs a portable electroencephalograph for Hawker to wear but, against Marshall’s express wishes, he also includes a concealed camera to record what Hawker sees when he is having his hallucinations.
The next part of the story details a test run of the device and also gives us more information about the three characters. Then, when Lucian and Marshall are out for dinner one night, Lucian gets a notification that Hawker has gone out on one of his regular runs. Lucian leaves Marshall and goes back to his lab to watch the camera, and subsequently hears Hawker talk to someone who isn’t visible on the video feed. Lucian then sees Marshall fall face first into the pool and rushes to the location to save him, whereupon he briefly sees a woman dressed in a lab coat standing waist deep in the water. Later, when Lucian examines the ECG and the film, he sees no sign of a woman, and realises that what he saw does not match what Hawker has described seeing.
Four weeks after his near-drowning Hawker resigns from his job, sets up an investment consultancy, and starts associating with a more glamourous set of people; he also refuses Marshall’s requests for further brain scans. This change in Hawker’s behaviour (spoiler) prompts Lucian to speculate that there was another personality lying dormant within Hawker—one that revealed itself by the nymph hallucinations, and which was born during the period of oxygen starvation. This prompts Lucian go back to the pond to meet his own lab-coat dressed “nymph,” which he believes will birth, as it did with Hawker, the dormant chrysalis within him. However, Lucian turns away at the last moment, and nevertheless becomes successful anyway.
The problem with this story is that Lucian’s speculation about the chrysalis idea isn’t convincing, it is introduced too late, and ends up essentially unrelated to his concluding personal development (although there is a note of ambiguity at the end). That said, Lucian—a sly, unethical, and slightly chippy character—makes for an interesting narrator. So, in conclusion, a well told story based on an unlikely and/or unconvincingly framed idea.
** (Average). 6,450 words.

1. Rather surprisingly this story won the 2020 Analog Readers’ Poll (Analytical Laboratory) for Best Short Story. Or maybe not a surprise, given SF readers’ penchant for latent supermen stories (Slan, etc.)

Draiken Dies by Adam-Troy Castro

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Draiken Dies by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog, September-October 2020)1 is the sixth of his ‘John Draiken’ stories but one which features another character, Delia Stang, a physically imposing woman with golden skin. She starts the story as a prisoner undergoing interrogation, partially paralysed by a device attached to her neck:

 The voice of her interrogator could be old or young; male, female, or any of the other associated genders; human, or some representative of several possible alien races. The golden woman has her suspicions. All she can determine of its character is a total lack of empathy.
“Your name is Delia Stang.”
“Yes.”
“Is that your actual name or just some alias you’re using?”
“Yes.”
“I would advise you not to play games with me.”
“I’m not playing games. It’s both my name and my alias. These are two different things.”
“Explain the distinction as you see it.”
“I was not born Delia Stang. It is the name all my associates know, the name I use when I think of myself. I could give you the one my parents gave me, but you are not interrogating a child with no choice over who she chooses to be. You are interrogating a grown woman who can be anyone she wants to be. I have used other aliases, but this is the only name I recognize.”
“If it suits me, I will call you anything I like and train you to accept it.”
“That would be exerting your techniques pretty early in the conversation, I think. I’m being cooperative enough. “
“Very well. Your name is Delia Stang. “
“Glad we have that settled.”
“Restrain from sarcasm.”
“That wasn’t sarcasm.”  p. 173

This intermittently amusing cat-and-mouse conversation makes up about half the story; the other half is concerned with what Stang was doing in Hallestagh (a dreary town of algae-eaters on the backwater planet of Garelagh) before she was taken prisoner. This latter thread begins with her beating up and seriously injuring a local strongman because of what he did to a young woman called Naline, who Stang then takes under her wing.
The rest of this part of the story oscillates between Stang interacting with Naline (mostly in a rented room above a bar where Stang has her sleep pod) and Stang tramping about the desolate local area (during which she sees an anomalous one hundred metre square indent in the landscape).
Meanwhile the interrogation thread dribbles out a steady stream of backstory, including the revelation that Stang killed Draiken because he asked her too (Stang says that Draiken had grown weary of hiding from the unnamed organisation of which the interrogator is part). Later, Stang is also asked about another man called Jathyx, who Draiken and she earlier freed from a space station.
These two threads merge at the end of the story (spoiler) when Stang is approached by an old man who tells her that she is being “talked about” in the wider population. We learn at the end of the story that this is Draiken in disguise, and he is passing on a warning that the shadowy organisation is about to attack her room and take her prisoner. The attack scene, with the exploding gel mattress that immobilises many of the attackers, is excitingly done, even though Stang is eventually captured.
The climax of the story (which occurs after Stang is once more visited in her cell by the disguised Draiken) sees Stang tell her interrogator that she is a decoy, that there is an attack vessel in orbit commanded by Jathyx’s mother, and that Draiken is alive—after he “died” a medical team immediately revived him (this was all done to give Stang a cover story that would stand up against a lie-detector).
At the very end of the piece, after the organisation’s hideout has been taken, Stang tries to get Draiken to return with her to Greeve (they have romantic history), a tropical planet where Draiken used to live—but he elects to continue pursuing the shadowy group that has been hunting him.
This is a pretty well done piece of SF adventure, and one that stands alone quite well considering that it wraps up a plot arc that has spread, presumably, over the previous five stories. That said, I’m not sure that this is really an SF story—more like a story with lots of SF furniture, and you could probably transplant the whole thing into a contemporary Mission Impossible movie. Still, not bad.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 20,200 words.

1. This story won the novella section of the Analog Readers Poll’ (The Analytical Laboratory) for 2020.

Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp

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Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp (Analog, April 1967) begins with a lively exchange between Lionel Prellen, a planetary administrator, and Lieutenant Sinclair, a Space Navy officer. Sinclair has been tasked to build an FTL landing grid on Verdammt to land a ship carrying an ambassador to the Unbekannt, the planet’s natives. Sinclair is not happy, and both he and his Admiral think the construction project is a waste of the military’s time.
The middle part of the story sees Sinclair become increasingly disgruntled, partly due to the Unbekannt clumping around on the top of the dome he is staying in (although when he goes out he sees nothing but a blur disappearing into the forest), and also because of the arguments he continues to have about the Unbekannt with Prellen and a psychologist called Wald. Although the two men try to convince Sinclair that the Unbekannt are unlike anything they have ever encountered before—the aliens seem to exist in their own reality—he in unmoved, and becomes more even annoyed when he finds the ambassador is bringing five women with him.
This all comes to a head when the Unbekannt once again clamber over Sinclair’s dome and he goes out and tries to thump one with a titanium rod. Not only is he momentarily stunned in the altercation but, after he recovers, he finds the rod has been bent into an intricate design—in the space of a few seconds. Intrigued, he decides to follow the alien into the bush.
The final part of the story sees Sinclair wander through the forest until he comes to an area where there appears to be a constantly changing reality. This transcendent experience is almost beyond his ability to comprehend, and he comes close to being overwhelmed:

Bewilderingly his surroundings achieved apparently impossible transpositions from the gloomy shadows of some huge Satanic complex to the white-hot negativeness of an isolated point of desert, then to an icy darkness punctuated by random colored shards so unimaginably out of perspective that he had to close his eyes in order to suffer them. And again the images blended and blurred and reformed, gaining substance and alien, incomprehensible meaning by keying some nonhuman semantic trigger which racked him with emotions which his body was not constructed to experience.
[. . .]
For a frantic moment he felt a single point of understanding with the Unbekannt, but in experimentally allowing his mind license to follow it, he lost the concept and found himself in a wilderness of unchartable madness.
His senses were screaming from the overload of unpredictable sensations, which gave rise to great fatigue and a sense of imminent collapse. His feet were restrained by a nightmare leadenness, and the whole structure of concept and analogy, which he had built for himself as a protective rationalization, was beginning to split open about his head. He knew that, if he cracked now and allowed the mad disorder to flow into his mind unfiltered, he would lose touch with reality and be forced to retreat down paths from which there might be no returning.  pp. 80-81 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

Fortunately Wald the psychologist reaches him in time and shoots him full of mescaline.
When the ambassador finally arrives (spoiler) we find out it is Prellen’s twenty-seven day old son: the hope is that by bringing the child up in the presence of the Unbekannt he will learn how to communicate with them. Wald also reveals that a crystalline structure he was examining earlier in the story is probably an Unbekannt embryo given to the humans for the same reason.
This is a very much an old school SF story (it feels like something from a decade or so earlier) and it’s not entirely convincing—but the scene where Sinclair experiences the Unbekannt reality isn’t bad, for all its hand-wavium. Maybe I just have a soft spot for Kapp’s work.
**+ (Average to Good). 6,950 words.

The Cold Solution by Don Sakers

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cold Solution by Don Sakers (Analog, July 1991) is a direct response to an earlier story from the magazine’s history, The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin (Astounding, August 1954). If you have never heard of this latter story it involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on his ship during a trip to take vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board (extra mass) the pilot won’t make it as he doesn’t have enough fuel. So the choice is: (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) confounds reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1
Reader reactions to the story often miss the Trolley Problem2 at its heart (which of these two awful choices do you choose?) and generally fall into one of two categories: (a) there are engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, or (b) the piece is an intentional piece of misogyny because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic prior treatment in the story, the likely feelings of the readers—who were from a “woman and children first” generation—and the fact that if it was a man no-one would care. That said, the pilot could have shot her first, which would have been a quicker and less painful death.)3 As we shall see, the piece under consideration falls into the first category.
Saker’s story begins in a similar manner to Godwin’s original with a female spaceship pilot finding a young boy who has smuggled on board her ship. The next few pages are a clunky setup of the problem outlined above (along with in-jokes and references to the original—the boy had spoken to a “Technician Godwin,” and the pilot remembers an old story that she read at the Academy, etc.). Eventually, the ship gets closer and closer to the decision point (there are options that give her a little more fuel but not enough) and, just before they get there, she tells the boy she’d give anything to prevent his death—just before dialling up her laser knife to maximum.
The story (spoiler) then cuts to a hospital where both of them are having their limbs regenerated, and we find out that the pilot amputated various of their limbs with the laser knife, before putting them out the airlock to get down to the required mass (I think the amputations include her legs, and one of his arms and both of his legs, but I can’t remember).
This is a silly end to a story that either (a) misses the conundrum at the heart of the original story or (b) decides to dodge it. Or maybe thinks that there is no philosophical problem so large that it can’t be sorted with a big enough spanner.
Worth reading for the unintentionally hilarious ending.
* (Mediocre). 4,100 words.

1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story see The Cold Equations at sfmagazines.com.

2. The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter.

3. For a story that responds to Godwin’s story as a misogynistic piece see my review of Think Like a Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly at sfmagazines.com.

Microbe by Joan Slonczewski

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Microbe by Joan Slonczewski (Analog, August 1995) is one of the author’s ‘Elysium Cycle’ stories, and opens with an exploration team discussing the biochemistry of the alien planet, IP3, that they are orbiting. The team are Andra, a human female; Skyhook, a sentient space shuttle AI; and Pelt, a sentient nanoplast AI who also serves as a protective suit for Andra.
Their discussion, in particular, focuses on the alien cell structure of life on the planet, and they watch as an alien cell splits into three. Unfortunately these discussions (there are more later on in the story) tend to result in writing like this:

“The usual double helix?” asked Skyhook. The double helix is a ladder of DNA nucleotide pairs, always adenine with thymine or guanine with cytosine, for the four different “letters” of the DNA code. When a cell divides to make two cells, the entire helix unzips, then fills in a complementary strand for each daughter cell.  p. 372 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

The second act of the story sees Andra, Pelt and Skyhook exploring the surface, where they discover a herd of strange rolling aliens which are later attacked by a much larger one. Then Pelt starts malfunctioning, and Andra (spoiler) barely makes it back to the shuttle before Pelt shuts down. There is some further discussion about the way that the alien microbes attacked Pelt’s nanoplast structure, and the crew’s solution.
This reads like part science lecture, part story, and has an open ending that suggests it is the first chapter of a novel. I’d have preferred a longer piece that was more of a story, but overall this is okay, I guess.
** (Average). 4,200 words.

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford

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A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford (Analog, November 1995) starts—not entirely clearly—with a female astronaut1 called Claire piloting her spaceship near the Sun’s corona in an attempt to survey a transiting black hole. The story then flashbacks to Mercury where a high-tech bailiff serves her, and we get back story about her debts, the imminent repossession of her specially outfitted ore-carrying spaceship, etc. All of which eventually leads her to accept a contract from SolWatch to undertake the hazardous job outlined in the first section.
This set up forms the first third of the story, and the rest of the piece continues in a similarly plodding vein:

Using her high-speed feed, Erma explained. Claire listened, barely keeping up. In the fifteen billion years since the wormhole was born, odds were that one end of the worm ate more matter than the other. If one end got stuck inside a star, it swallowed huge masses. Locally, it got more massive.
But the matter that poured through the mass-gaining end spewed out the other end. Locally, that looked as though the mass-spewing one was losing mass. Space-time around it curved oppositely than it did around the end that swallowed.
“So it looks like a negative mass?”
IT MUST. THUS IT REPULSES MATTER. JUST AS THE OTHER END ACTS LIKE A POSITIVE, ORDINARY MASS AND ATTRACTS MATTER.
“Why didn’t it shoot out from the Sun, then?”
IT WOULD, AND BE LOST IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE. BUT THE MAGNETIC ARCH HOLDS IT.
“How come we know it’s got negative mass? All I saw was—”
Erma popped an image into the wall screen.
NEGATIVE MASS ACTS AS A DIVERGING LENS, FOR LIGHT PASSING NEARBY. THAT WAS WHY IT APPEARED TO SHRINK AS WE FLEW OVER IT.
Ordinary matter focused light, Claire knew, like a converging lens. In a glance she saw that a negative ended wormhole refracted light oppositely. Incoming beams were shoved aside, leaving a dark tunnel downstream. They had flown across that tunnel, swooping down into it so that the apparent size of the wormhole got smaller.  p. 150 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

The extensive explanations in this piece (there is an accompanying diagram) caused my eyes to glaze over, and the unengaging dramas that Claire is subjected to did not provide any relief. The ship AI is also mildly irritating, as well as possibly homicidal—at one point Claire asks about the peak gravity on an approach, whereupon the AI tells her “27.6 gravities”—death for a human. You would have thought that it might have said so earlier, or perhaps it takes a relaxed view of Asimov’s First Law (the part about not letting humans come to harm through inaction).
In the final pages of the story (spoiler) she manages to capture the black hole and sell the rights for a huge amount of money, more than enough to clear her debts.
In some respects this is a typical dull Analog story, with lots of speculative science substituting for anything of interest.
* (Mediocre). 8,300 words.

1. The character is supposed to be female but she comes over as a shouty, impulsive man in drag, to be honest.