The seconds seemed to go slower as the last timer fell. On the screen two ships waited outside the gate, preparing to begin the first transit. It was like looking into the past, waiting for something to happen that had already happened. The light bouncing off those ships and streaking toward her was almost an hour old, from her frame of reference, anyway.
The last timer hit zero. Somewhere farther away than a mere normal light-hour, something very violent happened in whatever non-space the gates passed through. Elvi held her breath.
“Are we seeing anything?” Sagale asked, his voice tight and tense.
“Nothing yet,” Jen said.
Elvi waited for the weird dilation of perception. The sense of being able to see atoms and waves, of experiencing herself and her environment in such detail that the border between them vanished, her body and the universe smearing together like a watercolor painting under a faucet. One breath, then another. It kept not happening.
“All right,” Sagale said. “Protocol says we will hold position and remain in safety restraints until—”
“Holy shit,” Travon said. “Are you guys seeing this?”
On the screens, the space around them boiled. As Elvi watched, confirmation started rolling in from the outlying probes. One after the other, they all reported the same thing. An uptick in quantum particle annihilation. The underlying hum of the vacuum cranking up to a shriek.
“That,” Travon said, his voice low and breathy, “is beautiful. Just look at it.”
“Report,” Sagale said.
“It’s like what we saw in Sol system, sir,” Jen said. “Virtual particle activity has increased massively. I’d have to say they noticed us.”
“Check the time stamp,” Sagale said. “Have we lost consciousness? Did we stay awake the whole time?”
“We did,” Elvi said even before she checked the data. “I mean the second one. We didn’t lose consciousness. We stayed awake.”
“Yeah, our entanglement experiment didn’t break either,” Jen said. “They all failed in Sol system. Ours looks fine. Whatever this is, it’s different.”
Sagale chuckled, and a broad smile grew on his lips. Elvi thought it was the first time she’d seen the man showing anything like real pleasure. “Well now,” he said. “That is interesting.”
“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 launche
d 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.
They did have a few advantages. The Storm’s skin returned an extremely low radar profile compared to other ships. Her internal heat sinks could store days of waste heat. And when necessary, capillary-like microtubules in the ship’s skin could be flushed with liquid hydrogen to ensure that the hull’s outer temperature remained only a few degrees warmer than space. It was a very stealthy ship when it was flying dark. If the Laconians were looking for a standard rock hopper or salvaged military ship, the Storm could look too small to fit the profile. He checked the hydrogen supply, adjusted the temperature variables in his search, and looked again. The window opened a crack wider.
They could take off from Callisto when the moon was behind Jupiter, then do one very hard burn with the planet blocking line of sight to the Tempest and any other inner-planet observation posts. It wouldn’t keep other ships and minor posts from picking up the drive plume—there were just too many eyes in the system to evade all of them, no matter how complex his flight path. But between running cold and keeping the main observers blocked, he could get a decent delta-v for a few hours. Then they could kill the burn and float dark for as long as the heat sinks held up. Once they’d put a little distance between themselves and the Jovian system, cozied up to the gravitational low-energy paths that the Belters and salvage miners used, they could fade in their fake transponder, start a very gentle burn toward the ring, and hope they looked like just one of dozens of ships headed that way.
Once they were far enough away, put in a call to Saba and see if any of the union ships had room to scoop them up and get them the hell out of Sol system.
It was pretty damn thin, as escape plans went. But they were living in thin times.
Alex ran the simulation back and forth, adding in various launch and escape burn projections until he’d come up with a plan that the computer agreed gave them the best chance of success. If he hadn’t overlooked anything. If the variables were weighted correctly. If the gods didn’t just hate them that day.
He leaned back, and his skull throbbed like his brain had an appointment elsewhere. He stretched his neck. The muscles felt like he’d been punched. There had been a time he could go for hours fine-tuning a flight plan. And he still could, but the price was higher. He swatted the desk to shut down the holographic map display. The room lights came up on the small and dingy working space he was occupying during their stay on Callisto. A desk that fed directly to the Storm’s system so that none of his queries would leak out to Callisto’s larger data environment. A wall screen with access to a couple thousand different information and entertainment streams. A combination sink, toilet, and shower alcove in the corner that included a rank mildew smell free of charge. It even had a cot with a flat pillow and threadbare blanket if he decided not to head back to his coffin hotel. All the discomforts of a naval base bachelor pad. It didn’t make him nostalgic.
He was stirring a chalky analgesic powder into a glass of water, the grains of medicine swirling like stars, when his terminal began playing the first few bars of his favorite Dust Runners song. “Accept connection,” he yelled at it, then gulped down his medicine. The bitterness crawled up his tongue like a living thing, and he shuddered. “Yo, Bobbie, what’s up?”
“Meet me at the dining room in twenty,” she said, then closed the connection before he could ask a question.
Dining room was just a code phrase for a small storage compartment off a seldom-used side tunnel. It was one of half a dozen rooms they’d designated for secret meetings. They were swept every couple of days for listening devices, and members of Bobbie’s strike team dressed in civilian clothes kept an eye on them to see if anyone else was going in or out.
Alex’s time in the military had all been on board ships or on naval bases waiting for a shipboard assignment. He’d never been a spy or special forces operator like Bobbie. He found the built-in paranoia that came with a secret mission lifestyle exhausting.
“I should probably pick up some food,” he said to his terminal. It beeped a recognition at him, then sent an order to a noodle shop in the lower medina. The owner of the shop was a resistance member who would send a pickup notification to Caspar. It was another code. He wasn’t even vaguely hungry, but if someone heard him or got a copy of the signal, it sounded innocuous. Nothing about his life was what it looked like anymore.
Ten minutes later Alex walked into the back room of the noodle shop and found Caspar waiting for him. When they weren’t using the space for secret meetings, it was the noodle shop’s dry goods pantry, and boxes of supplies were stacked up against most walls. The station’s heating ducts had been closed off, so the room stayed about ten degrees cooler than the shop itself, and Alex could just see his breath in the air.
“How long do you need?” the kid asked without preamble.
“Dunno. Give me two hours, then we’ll meet up at the casino. Blackjack. I’ll be at the five-dollar table.”
“Copy that,” Caspar said. He pulled off the heavy hooded jacket he was wearing and handed it to Alex. Alex put the jacket on and passed his terminal to Caspar. The kid would wander the station for a couple hours. Anyone who was tracking Alex by terminal location would be sent on a merry chase. It was unlikely that anyone was tracking any of them. The terminals were as stripped down and anonymized as it was possible to make them. If their false identities had been cracked, they would probably already have been picked up by security and in
terrogated by Laconian operatives. But Bobbie had laid down the operational security law, and they all followed her rules to the letter.
Caspar took the terminal and stuffed it into his jumpsuit pocket, then gave Alex a cheery little wave and headed for the door. “Wait,” Alex said.
“Everything okay?” Something in Alex’s tone had put a little worry line between the younger man’s eyes. Nothing is okay, Alex wanted to reply, but didn’t.
“Just be careful. Something happens to you, it doubles my workload.” He tried to make it a joke, but it fell flat. The line between Caspar’s eyes deepened.
“I don’t need you to daddy me, Alex. I know my job.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Alex said, then leaned against the wall and rubbed his eyes. His headache made him want to press his face against it. Only a thin layer of composites and insulation separated him from the natural tunnel. Maybe some ice that was as old as the solar system itself would be cool enough to numb the throb in his temples.
“It’s no big deal,” Caspar said. “But my father pulled up stakes when I was seven. I didn’t need one then, and I don’t now.”
“Fair enough. Truth is…”
Caspar waited. Alex heaved a sigh.
“Truth is I’m worried shitless about my own kid, and I’m just projecting onto you. Don’t take it as anything else, okay?”
Alex waited for Caspar to leave, but he didn’t. Instead he sat down on a stack of boxes labeled SOY NOODLES and crossed his arms. “You think the Laconians know it was us?”
“What? No, I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t fuck around, Alex. I have family too.”
“It’s not that,” Alex said. He spotted a small bag of dehydrated onion flakes and picked it up. It felt cold in his hand, and heavenly when he pressed it to his temple. Caspar sat on his boxes, staring and bouncing one knee impatiently.
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