“God damn,” Travon said, “look at this. This is incredible.”
The rates of virtual particle creation and annihilation were swamping the sensors. All the readings pegged at shit-if-I-know-but-more-than-I-can-keep-track-of. Elvi pressed her fingertips to her lips. She’d been braced for the weird dive into broken consciousness. That it hadn’t come was somehow worse.
“Continue monitoring,” Sagale said. “High Consul Duarte will be pleased with this.”
“Why?” Elvi asked.
Sagale looked at her as if she’d made a joke he didn’t quite understand. “The behavior changed. It suggests the enemy can be negotiated with.”
“It doesn’t show change at all. You fired the magnetic field projector in Sol system and whatever this is responded with the bullet on the Tempest. Then you came here and did something completely different, and it responded differently. There’s literally no data we can take from that.”
“We know now that when we send a punishment ship through, the enemy feels it,” Sagale said. “All this? It isn’t because a couple of ships vanished. Ships have been vanishing since we started using the gates. This tells us that the tool we’ve made can hurt them. That’s very important. We won’t know if it can teach them until we repeat the experiment.”
And there it was. Repeat the experiment.
“Jen?” Travon said. He hadn’t heard anything Sagale said. All his attention was on his screens. “Are you seeing this? There’s precipitate.”
Sagale’s attention turned. “There’s what? What are you seeing?”
“The virtual particles aren’t all annihilating. It’s generating some . . . looks like hydrogen ions? Basically just raw protons.”
“Does it pose a threat?”
“No, this is trivial. Even in normal interstellar space, you have an atom or two per cubic centimeter. This is still way below that. If this system hadn’t already been weirdly empty, I wouldn’t have noticed this at all. I mean, I guess if it goes on for a few decades, it could get to be a problem? Maybe?”
Sagale looked over at Elvi. His plate-flat face was expressionless. It made him seem smug.
“Still,” Jen said, “if it’s the whole solar bubble, that is a shit-ton of energy. Not rigorously speaking, of course, but just a lot.”
“Energy?” Fayez asked.
“Energy. Matter,” Jen said. “Same thing. If they’re creating actual matter, they’re throwing a lot of energy at us to do it.”
“Is it evenly distributed?” Fayez asked. Elvi heard something in his voice. A deep rasp that spoke of growing fear.
“Oh,” Jen said. And then a breath later, “Oh shit.”
“Kind of early to know that,” Travon said, clearly behind the curve. “We’ve only got a couple dozen probes out there. Why?”
“So I know I’m just the geology guy here,” Fayez said. “But aren’t we a little less than two light-hours away from a neutron star? One that we were all really impressed at how something had designed it to be right on the edge of collapse? And now something’s putting more energy and mass into the system? Because that sounds like it could be a problem.”
Elvi’s gut tightened.
“Hold on,” Jen said, her fingers dancing fast over her controls. The screen flickered as she generated energy curves against time and mass. A few seconds later, she made a little grunt like she’d been punched. “Well, shit.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Sagale said. “Nothing has happened yet. The star looks stable.”
“The star was stable two hours ago,” Jen said. “But when a rapidly spinning neutron star collapses into a black hole, a gamma ray burst comes out of the poles. A few seconds of it releases as much energy as Sol would in its whole ten billion years. They’re very rare.”
Travon’s face had gone ashy. Elvi felt a shifting sensation deep in her gut, pulling her between fear and awe.
“Commander Lively, are we about to experience one?” Sagale asked, but Jen was elbows deep in calculations before he said it.
“It won’t have gone critical,” Jen said. “Not yet. Assuming the precipitate generation rate is uniform, which I don’t actually know. But we should get out of here as quickly as we can.”
“As quickly as we can without killing Elvi,” Fayez said. “We almost lost her once. We can’t do a max burn.”
“All of us dying isn’t better,” Sagale said. Despite everything, Elvi felt a bleak tug of amusement at how fast the man could change his opinions in the face of evidence.
The admiral pursed his lips. His eyes focused on something internal as he thought. Then, “Commander Lively, please send out your analysis to the tech ship and the team on Medina.” He tapped his control board, and his voice echoed through the ship. “All hands make ready. Expect an extended high-g burn.”
“We can’t just shoot the ring gate, sir,” Travon said. “We’ve got about a billion kilometers to get to the ring, and a million to slow down in on the other side. Less if we go at an angle, and we still need to miss Medina and the central station so . . .”
“I’m aware of the issues,” Sagale said. “Please make ready. Major Okoye, I’m going to ask that you report to the med bay. My understanding is that we may be able to make this safer for you if we forgo sedation in the submersion couch. It will be unpleasant.”
“That’s okay,” Fayez said. “She’s okay with that. We’ll both go without. I will too.” He turned to her. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I just really need you not to die.”
“I understand, Admiral,” Elvi said. “I’ll go now.”
Sagale nodded once, tightly. Elvi undid the restraints, pushed gently off, floating in the cool air. Fayez had already launched himself down the corridor toward the couches. Elvi grabbed a handhold, stopping herself. She didn’t know if the feeling in her chest was rage or fear or a bitter kind of amusement. Whatever it was felt cold.
“Admiral . . .”
“Yes, Major Okoye?”
I told you so hovered in the air between them. She didn’t have to say it. She could see that he’d heard.
On the screen behind him, the first ship’s drive came to life, moving the ship toward the ring gate. The illusion that it could still stop—that they could undo what had already happened—was as powerful as it was wrong. The bomb ship’s drive cone flared a moment later as it moved to follow.
In a smaller window in the same screen, the neutron star at the heart of the dead system glowed tiny and bright.
Chapter Seventeen: Alex
Hiding a ship in space wasn’t all that different from hiding on a school playground. Find something bigger than you, and put it between you and the person looking. Even without something to hide behind it wasn’t impossible. Space was vast, and the things that floated through it were mostly cold and dark. If you could find a way not to radiate heat and light, it was possible to get lost in the mix.
Alex ran a map of the Jovian system forward in time, then back again. The moons spun around the gas giant, then reversed and spun back to their starting places. Possible paths shot through the imaginary space like threads of copper, tracing the complex interactions of thrust and temperature and the ever-changing invisible clockwork of interacting gravity. And as he manipulated the variables—what paths became open if they could add another half a degree to the ship, what closed down if they shortened the burn time—the paths blinked in and out of existence. A plan slowly began to form.
Finding an escape route to get the Storm off Callisto before the Laconian battleship came in range meant plotting a course off the moon that only included engine burns when the massive bulk of Jupiter was between them and the inner system, and then floating cold and dark when they were in the open. That narrowed the range down. But it was still a little more complicated than that.
Io, Europa, and Ganymede all had observation stations that might be in Laconian control and could pick up their launch and flag it as suspicious. He also needed to plan the launch for a time when Callisto had Jupiter between it, the sun, and the other three Galilean moons. Alex ran the orbital simulation forward again. A solution existed. There was a window where Callisto was alone on the antisunward side of Jupiter, caught in its shadow long enough to get the Storm off the ground. It made for a tight window. Maybe too tight.