He was talking fast and, Drummer thought, more than half to himself. That she was in the room let him think out loud, but he didn’t have his science-advisor voice tuned up. This was one step short of a chimpanzee shrieking and pointing at the charred spot where lightning had struck.
“If you look at it, the gates themselves are clearly bounded by lightspeed. The strategy the protomolecule employs is to send out bridge builders at subluminal speeds to environments where there are stable replicators to hijack and employ to … to poke holes into a different space. Going from Sol gate to Laconia or Ilus or wherever, we don’t accelerate ships past lightspeed, we just take a shortcut because the slow zone is a place outside locality where very different places in our reference can be very nearby in that frame.”
“That’s great,” Drummer said. “Was it a weapon?”
Tur goggled at her. “Was what a weapon?”
“That—” She waved her fingers in front of his eyes. “That whatever the hell that was. With the hallucinations and the missing time. Was it a weapon? Can the Laconians turn us off like that anytime they want?”
“It was … it was associated with their weapon,” Tur said. “I mean it happened at the same time, but that’s the thing. Time doesn’t actually work like that. ‘The same time’ is a weird linguistic fantasy. It doesn’t exist. Simultaneity doesn’t act like this.”
He waved his arms, flapping them out toward the sides of the room. This.
The whatever-the-hell-it-had-been hadn’t just happened in Drummer’s meeting room, or on People’s Home. It had been spread throughout the system—Earth and Mars, Saturn’s moons and Jupiter’s. Even the science stations on moons around Neptune and Uranus, and the deep labs in the Kuiper Belt. The reports were startlingly similar—hallucinations and lost time that began uniformly at the moment the Tempest had fired its magnetic weapon at Pallas Station. Or, more accurately, the moment in the Tempest’s frame of reference. Tur seemed very specific about that. Like it was important.
“But it didn’t happen when they fired it in the slow zone,” Drummer said. “Why didn’t Medina have this happen?”
“What? Oh, no, we don’t know. The ring space and the station there and the gates, we don’t know what their relationship is with normal space. The rules of physics may be different. I mean, it’s clearly an active system, and the energy output from the magnetic weapon there was smaller than the gamma bursts that came from it, so it was tapping into an energy supply that didn’t have anything to do with the Tempest per se. But the thing is I’m not sure that was a propagating event. If it wasn’t a propagating event, then maybe it didn’t violate lightspeed.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Drummer said between clenched teeth.
“Well, I mean when you drop a pebble in a pond, there are ripples. They propagate, and all propagation is limited by lightspeed. But instead of a pebble, imagine you dropped a sheet of plating. So that the surface of the plating hit the surface of the pond everywhere at once. It doesn’t matter that the trigger that dropped the plate was in one place, because it happened everywhere. Not a point location, but a nonlocalized location.”
“Nonlocalized. Location,” Drummer said, pressing her palms into her eye sockets. Annoyance and fear curled in her throat. So you’re telling me you don’t know shit floated at the back of her mouth.
“Everyone would experience it as if the effect began exactly with them and then propagated away in every direction at the speed of light, but in reality—”
“I don’t care,” she said. It was still harsh, but less than what she wanted to do. Tur reared back from her anyway. “What it is, what it means about the way you understand the universe or physics? I don’t care. None of that matters to me.”
“But—”
“They just demonstrated a weapon that at its minimum ripped Pallas Station down to hyperaccelerated dust. I am preparing to lead thousands of soldiers on hundreds of ships into battle against this thing. You need to tell me was that a glitch in consciousness because of their attack, or can they make that happen again anytime they want? Did they know it was going to happen? Did they suffer all the same high weirdness that we did? Because if they can turn our brains off for a few minutes at will, I’m going to need some very different strategies.”
By the end, she was shouting. She hadn’t meant to shout. Tur had his hands up, palms toward her, like he was afraid she might attack. Fine, let him wonder. Maybe it would focus him up.
“I … that is …” Tur took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I feel comfortable saying that the glitch, if that’s what we’re calling it, was associated with Tempest’s attack on Pallas. Given that it didn’t happen in the slow zone, I can’t say whether it was a controlled effect or an artifact of the weapon with some quality of local space around Sol.”
“All right,” Drummer said.
“Whether the enemy anticipated it or not, I can’t say.”
“That’s fair,” Drummer said. The first pricks of regret were forming at the back of her mind. She shouldn’t have yelled at him.
“And I can’t say whether they suffered the same effect … but I would guess they did. If I’m right about the mechanism, there isn’t any sort of shielding against it. You can’t block something that’s already there. That’s what nonpropagating means. It doesn’t come from anyplace. Everywhere it is, that’s where it came from.”
Drummer leaned back. That, at least, was interesting. If the Laconians had to go through the same things she had every time they fired their big gun, it would make a gap when automated systems might be able to penetrate their defenses.
“We’re also seeing the increased quantum creations and annihilations much more broadly,” Tur was saying somewhere nearby. “Like system-wide broadly. And there’s early suggestion that some experiments on Neptune and Luna that were working with controlled entanglement structures collapsed. So maybe—”
Drummer leaned back in her chair, folding her hands together. Her eyelids fell to half-mast. She knew—they all knew—that this was the first time one of the Laconian ships had left its home system. This wasn’t only an invasion, it was also a shakedown cruise. And nothing ever went completely as expected on a shakedown. The question was whether the Laconians knew what had happened. Whether they’d been anticipating it. If they’d been taken by surprise as well, they might not risk using the magnetic beam again.
Tur wouldn’t be able to tell her that. Or Vaughn or Lafflin. Admiral Trejo could say it, but not to her. Which meant there was only one plausible way for her to find out.
Her heart leaped at the idea, and she waited for the joy to fade before she risked thinking about it again. It was always dangerous when the universe fell down in a pattern where the thing you wanted and the wise path were the same.
Somewhere, Tur was still talking. He might as well have been on another ship. Drummer’s mind pressed through the possibilities, the dangers, the possible profits, and the certain loss. Each time, she found herself at the same conclusion.
She thanked Tur, using the social conventions of conversation to signal him it was time for him to go. She even shook his hand to make up a little for losing her temper before. As she walked him to the door, he was still talking about locality and signal loss. She closed the door behind him and went back to her desk.
Vaughn answered the connection request like his finger had been hovering over the button.
“Ma’am?”
“The Tempest is going to make a report. It may go back to Medina, or route through Medina back to Laconia,” she said. “We’re going to find out what it says.”
“Yes, ma’am. And how are we going to do that?”
“Saba,” she said. “The risk is worth it now. We’re reopening communications with Medina.”
Chapter Thirty-Five: Singh
An improvised explosive device punctured a liquid-oxygen storage tank on deck four of the engineering section,” Overstreet said. He was reading from a report that scrolled by on the monitor wrapped around his thick forearm. “We’ve recovered very little of the device itself, but what few pieces we have indicate it was made with material common to this facility. It’ll be difficult if not impossible to track the exact source.”
Singh sat and listened to the report and tried to look present and thoughtful. But the truth was, his mind was bouncing around like a tiny animal trying to escape a predator. He found he only processed about half of what Overstreet was saying. His hands were shaking so badly that he didn’t trust himself to pick up the glass of water on the desk in front of him. He kept them under the desk, where Overstreet wouldn’t see them. The sense that he was in immediate danger was inescapable because it was true.