Then she reached a part of the report that she had to read three times to be sure she’d understood. She felt the blood draining from her face.
“It collapsed into… it collapsed into a black hole? They collapsed the neutron star into a black hole?”
“We believe so,” her father said. “It was precariously balanced, and apparently maintained at that balance point in a way we don’t understand. When more mass was added to the star, it was enough to push it over.” He put a hand over the report and looked into her eyes. “Dr. Okoye and her team saw that there was a danger from that. Do you know what it was?”
“The gamma burst,” Teresa said. “It’s the most energetic event that there is. We’ve seen gamma bursts from other galaxies.”
“That’s correct,” he said, but she couldn’t get her mind around it. “And what do you remember about Tecoma system?”
She drew a blank. She should have known. Should have remembered.
“The star’s rotation put the poles in line with the gate,” he said, gently. “No other system we’ve ever seen has been like that.”
“What happened?” Teresa asked. He took his hand away, letting her read the rest of the report. “We lost two gates?”
“We did,” her father said as if it were a normal thing. “And we saw plumes of gamma radiation coming out on the solar system side of every other ring gate, much the way they did when the Tempest hit the alien station in the ring hub with its magnetic field generator. And…”
It was like hearing that sometimes you woke up in the morning and didn’t have a color anymore. That red could die. Or that three could be shot off the number line. Learning that a gate could be destroyed was like learning that a rule of her universe so basic that she’d never even thought of it as a rule had been violated. If he’d said You actually have two bodies or Sometimes you can walk through walls or You can also breathe rock, it wouldn’t have felt stranger. More displacing.
He raised his eyebrows. What else? She looked at the report. She felt like she was shaking, but her hands looked steady. It only took her a few seconds.
“And the Plain of Jordan failed its transit,” she said. “We lost a ship.”
“Yes,” he said. “That, it turns out, is the critical issue. Here is the decision we have to make. What do we do about it?”
Teresa shook her head, not disagreeing but reaching for some kind of clarity. The scale of the damage was overwhelming. Her father leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers.
“This is a policy decision. And policy decisions are difficult,” he said, “because there may not be a right answer. Put yourself in my place. Think about the larger picture. Not just now, not just here, but everywhere that humanity is going to spread. And forever. What is the wise course of action for me now?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and her voice sounded small, even to her.
He nodded. “That’s fair. Let me narrow the options. The rules of game theory are that when a ship fails to transit, we punish our opponents. That’s the basis of the policy I put in place. So in light of what happened, do we follow that now, or do we stop?”
“We stop,” Teresa said without hesitation. She saw the disappointment in her father’s eyes, but she didn’t understand it. It was the obvious answer. He took a deep breath and tapped his fingers against his lips for a moment before he said anything.
“Let me give you some context. There was an incident when you were young,” he said. “This was when your mother was still with us, so you were very young. Barely able to speak. You had a favorite toy. A carved wooden horse.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“That’s all right. There was a day when you needed to nap. You were very, very tired and very cranky. Your mother was trying to feed you, the way she did before you slept, but you were chewing on your horse. Your mouth was full. So your mother took the horse away, and you threw a tantrum. In that case, we had two options. We could keep the toy away from you so that you could do what needed to be done. Or we could hand it back, and teach you that throwing tantrums worked.”
The image of Elsa in her mother’s arms came to her like it was being projected on her brain. Had all that been a mistake? Had Elsa’s mother, by comforting her child, told her that it was okay to shout and flip over tables? It hadn’t seemed like that at the time.
“You think we should… You’re sending through a bomb ship?”
“Tit for tat,” he said. “It means keeping traffic out of the ring space for a time. It means not evacuating any more ships until we can make the experiment. But we can show the enemy that we are disciplined. Or we can show it that we aren’t.”
“Oh,” Teresa said. She didn’t know what else there was to say.
Her father tilted his head. His voice was still gentle. Almost coaxing. “This is why I want you with me. These are the decisions people like you and I have to make. Normal people don’t. This is the logic and the vision we have to apply. And we have to be ruthless about it. The stakes are too high for anything else.”
“It’s the only way we can win,” she said.
“I don’t know that we’ll win,” he said. “I’ve never known that. I’ve always known that we’d fight. From the moment the gates opened, I knew we’d go through them. That, and the chances were good that we would encounter whatever had killed the civilization that came before us.”
“Goths,” she said. “Goths and lead-lined water pipes.”
He chuckled. “Ilich has been talking about ancient Rome again. Yes, well. We can call them Goths if you like. As soon as we knew that there was something out there, we knew that we would come in conflict with it. The war was inevitable from the second we had an opponent. I don’t know whether we’ll defeat them. But I know that if we defeat them, it will be like this. With intelligence and ruthlessness and an unwavering purpose. Those are the only tools we have that matter.”
Teresa nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had the wrong answer.”
“I knew you might,” he said. “It’s why I asked you here. You will learn, over time, how to think the way I think. How to be the kind of leader that I’ve taught myself to be. Some of it will take effort. Some of it will happen naturally just because you get older. And some of it, I think, will happen as you… change.”
“Change?”
“Transform. Become immortal. I’ve spoken to Dr. Cortázar about beginning the process with you. It will take time, of course, but since I began the treatments, I’ve learned so much. Things I couldn’t know when I was just… just human, I suppose.”
He took her hand. The opalescence in his eyes and skin seemed to brighten for a moment. When he spoke, there was a depth to his voice like the room had gained an echo.
“There’s so much that I see now that I never saw before. You’ll see it too.”
Chapter Twenty-One: Elvi
Elvi could see Sagale steeling himself for her reaction. It was in the way he tightened his jaw and the flatness of his eyes. She had one foot tucked into a hold on the wall, her hand on another. She waited for the outrage or the vertigo or some physical sign in herself to match his expectations. What she found was a bleak disappointment.
When he’d called her to his office, she’d suspected it was bad news. Now that the rest of the crew had been decanted and brought up to speed, anything said on the bridge, no matter how softly, was common knowledge in minutes. Fear did that to people. Made them fast to share and gossip.
“If I object to this plan?” she said. “Because we both know I object to this plan.”
“I will pass it directly to High Consul Duarte,” Sagale said. “It is as important to him as it is to me that you understand how seriously we take your concerns.”
“Will it change anything?”
“Candidly?” Sagale said.
“For fuck’s sake. Another bomb ship? After…” She gestured toward the deck with her free hand, meaning the ring space, the missing gates, all of it. She’d had almo
st three days to process the enormity of it, and she couldn’t. It was too big.
Three days was long enough for Sagale to report in and for Duarte to deliberate and respond. It probably wasn’t long enough for Sagale to have pushed back and been shut down. He hadn’t even tried. That was the disappointing part.
“We have protocol. It is that when a ship fails to transit, send a bomb ship through the same gate. It’s the only way to keep our message clear.”
“And then see if we can lose another gate or two?”
“The losses that we have suffered are… significant,” Sagale said. “But it is the considered opinion of the high consul that they do not represent an escalation on the part of the enemy.”
“How do you even get there?”
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 thro
ugh.”
“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.”
Five minutes later Sagale came on the bridge, floating toward his station like none of them were there. Elvi remembered seeing him in the same place, still damp from the crash couch and weeping. He was a different man now. For a moment, against her will, she admired him. Sagale considered the display in silence. The loudest sounds were the hush of the air recyclers and the flutter of Travon’s right thumb and middle finger.
He considered the energy graphs as Jen explained them again. Sagale took it in impassively. When Jen had finished, he floated quietly in his crash couch restraints. His gaze flickered to Elvi’s, and she thought there was something in them. Gratitude, maybe.
Tiamat's Wrath Page 21
