Sagale lifted a hand, palm out, but the softening in his eyes made it a request to hear him out more than an order that she be silent. Elvi crossed her arms and nodded him on.
“The attacks the enemy made on us have been ineffective in that—in that—they did insignificant primary damage. The loss of consciousness that we experienced in Sol system when Pallas died might have been deadly for the protomolecule’s designers, but it was largely ineffective against us. The response in Tecoma system would have been trivial in any other system. The effect was . . . unfortunate only because of features of the landscape, so to speak, that are not in play elsewhere in the empire.”
“So I just picked a bad Bikini Atoll?” Elvi said.
“No one holds you responsible for what happened, Doctor. You couldn’t have known any more than we could. If anything, the strategic error was mine. I saw the inhospitable nature of the system as an advantage and overlooked the possible consequences.”
He spread his hands.
“Or,” Elvi said, “it was a trap.”
“I don’t see how—”
“No. Be quiet. It’s my turn now. What we saw in Tecoma wasn’t even similar to the previous interactions. We were awake the whole time. It didn’t change our perceptions of anything. That was something different. And if you look at the logic of it? It’s not even hard to see.”
“Walk me through it.”
“That star wasn’t natural, it was created. And it was created from a system that looked like Sol. It was manufactured and it was pointed at the ring gate. They aimed it like tying a shotgun trigger to a doorknob. Our bomb ship did something to activate it. Maybe it got something to come look at us, and that’s what set it off. I don’t know. But it was built to be a booby trap.”
Sagale’s scowl looked like he’d bitten into a bad date. “That is an interesting interpretation,” he said.
“It fired off the largest gun that it’s possible to make given the physical laws of the universe. And what’s more? The station was built to withstand it. It took a gamma burst from a collapsing neutron star, and it’s not dead.”
“You find that significant.”
“I find that pretty clear evidence that we’re way out of our weight class here and we should stop throwing punches!”
“You don’t have to shout, Doctor.”
Elvi unballed her fists and tried to relax her jaw. Her blood felt hot in her face, and she didn’t know if it was from fear or anger or if any normal emotions actually fit into a situation like this. Sagale’s system chimed an alert, and he muted it.
“I don’t disagree with you,” he said. “But what does not throwing punches look like?”
“Not sending bomb ships through would be a start.”
“It would. But so would abandoning the gates entirely. Would you recommend doing that? There are colonies that will collapse if we choose that, and maybe those are acceptable losses. But once the trouble began last time, shutting down the gate network didn’t save the beings that used it. They were dead when we turned the system back on.”
“Not starting trouble was my argument.”
“Trouble started long before Laconia existed. Ships have been disappearing for decades. Whatever this is, it began before we recognized it. The fastest way to undermine a strategic plan is to abandon it before there’s sufficient reason to do so. The high consul has been briefed. He believes that the tit-for-tat plan still has merit.”
“And so you’re going to do it.”
“I do as I’m told, Doctor. I am an officer of the Laconian military,” Sagale said. “As are you.”
The mood on the Falcon showed in small ways. Instead of wandering to and from the commissary while she thought, Jen remained rooted at her station. Travon moved through the ship tapping his thumb and middle finger together in a fluttering beat every time a new status update came from the Typhoon or Medina. Sagale stayed in his office for the most part, avoiding Elvi and Fayez and the rest of the science team as if their disapproval bothered him.
Out near Medina, a captain drew a short straw, and the Myron’s Folly was chosen as the bomb vessel. On the main screen, a swarm of loading mechs and drones hauled the cargo out of its hold. The little flares of their thrusters reminded Elvi of termite swarms.
The antimatter had been stored on Medina for a moment just like this. Governor Song’s engineers would set the ship’s reactor as close to critical as they could and disable the fail-safes, so that when the bombs went off, the reactor failure would add its own destructive punch to the mix. But there was the problem of making the ship go dutchman in the absence of other traffic.
The safety curve was based on the amount of matter and energy making transits though the gate network. Usually that meant keeping the flow down to safe levels. Now it meant driving it up past the threshold without sending another ship through. Protocol demanded, Sagale kept pointing out, that the bomb ship be the next thing to go. If they started pushing a dozen other ships through, the enemy might not understand the high consul’s point.
To do that, they had to pour a massive amount of energy through the gate. The Typhoon’s ultrahigh magnetic field projector could do it, but they were making sure there was nothing that would be damaged on the far side of the gate. The combination of caution and recklessness took her breath away.
“I should go talk to him again,” Elvi said.
“Tell him that he’s wrong more forcefully?” Fayez said. “See if he changes his mind because you disagree at him harder?”
“He’s not that bad,” she said. And then, because she knew that he was, “There has to be something.”
“There doesn’t, sweetheart.”
Jen looked up from her station monitor. Her lips were thin, her gaze restless. “Eighty thousand people in Thanjavur system,” she said. “One habitable planet with three cities, and a moon base on its major satellite. And they’re . . . I just can’t get my head around it. They’re just gone.”
“They might be fine,” Elvi said. “Just . . . out of contact. They may be better off than all of us at this rate.”
“Unless their sun exploded. There are stories about that, aren’t there? The protomolecule engineers burning whole systems?”
Travon fluttered his finger and thumb together again as he worked his station’s monitor. “Thanjavur’s only eight and a half light-years from Gedara. If there’s a big flash in eight and a half years, we’ll know what happened.”
“I don’t like this,” Jen said.
“None of us do,” Fayez said. “Honestly, I think old Sagale would skip this part if he could.”
“What?” Jen said. “No, not that. I mean yes, I don’t like that. But this too.”
She threw a dataset Elvi didn’t recognize onto the main monitor. The Myron’s Folly blinked away and a series of energy graphs took its place. Jen turned to look at them as if the significance were obvious.
“I’m a biologist,” Elvi said.
“We’re seeing radiation coming from in between the rings. We’ve never seen that before. There hasn’t been anything there to radiate. This little pocket universe just ends at the rings. Anything that went out was gone like it passed an event horizon. Now, since . . . well, since us? Something’s coming through.”
“Something’s knocking around in the attic,” Fayez said. “That’s not reassuring. I’m not reassured.”
“What do you make of it?” Elvi asked.
“I don’t know. I just have data, and it says something’s happening that didn’t happen before. And it’s not calming down.”
A voice in her memory said the words as clearly and distinctly as if they had been spoken: Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook. She let her breath out slowly from between her teeth.
Elvi opened a connection request to Sagale’s office. To his credit, he accepted it immediately. “Dr. Okoye.”
“Admiral, could you join us on the bridge? There’s some incoming data I’d like you to look at.”
She heard the hesitation while he decided whether it was a ploy to stop the bomb ship plan. Just because the data was real didn’t mean it wasn’t a ploy.
“I’m on my way,” Sagale said, and cut the connection.
“We could always mutiny,” Fayez said brightly.
“We wouldn’t stand a chance,” Travon said. “I did the nav analysis. Even if we took control of the ship, the Typhoon could blow us to dust before we got out a gate.”
“Jesus, Travon,” Fayez said. “I was joking.”
“Oh,” Travon said. “Sorry.”
“I remember when I was just a scientist,” Elvi said. “I liked that. It was nice.”