Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Sixteen: Elvi

The ships were old transports that had been hauling people and supplies around Sol system’s asteroid belt for a generation before the first gate opened. Elvi watched them being positioned near the surface of the Tecoma ring gate with the Falcon’s highest-power optical telescopes, and the images were still fuzzy. Both vessels were at most a few dozen meters top to bottom, and they were almost a billion kilometers away. If the Falcon’s sensor arrays hadn’t been orders of magnitude more sensitive than her eyes, they wouldn’t have been anything close to visible. But she could make out the mechs and drones crawling over them, making the automated checks and last-minute verifications. Maneuvering thrusters bloomed and vanished as they shifted along the plating and drive cones, checking and double-checking that nothing would go wrong. There was deep irony in that, but if she thought about it too much, she just got angry.

“Hey, sweetie,” Fayez said from the doorway. “Can I get you anything?

“Still no. Just like three minutes ago,” she snapped. She grunted, regret jumping into her throat just behind the words. “Sorry. That was shitty.”

“No, I see where you’re coming from,” her husband and intellectual companion of decades said. “I’m hovering. Look.”

He let go of the handhold and floated free for a moment, grinning at his own physical pun. She laughed more at the grin than the joke.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. Perfectly fine.”

“Good. That’s good. Because some people, when they almost die from being semidrowned in half-alien goo while under a sustained high-g burn, get a little rash. Or zits. Near death can really do terrible things for acne.”

“I’m sorry I scared you,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. Really. But I’m fine now.”

Fayez pulled himself into the room, twisting ungracefully to hook his ankles around the wall footholds and absorb the momentum with his knees. He stood on the wall beside her, looking down at the images on her screen.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “that my deep existential panic at the prospect of your death hasn’t faded as quickly as yours.”

“It’s okay. I probably wouldn’t be as calm about it if it had been you. By the time I found out about it, I already wasn’t dead. Doesn’t really have the same punch when you miss all the will-she-or-won’t-she clinging-to-life thing.”

“Yeah,” Fayez said. “I didn’t love that part. I mean, in fairness, I don’t love this part either.”

She put up her hand, and he wrapped his fingers in hers. It was how they always were. Decades of habit shrouded what they meant in humor and wit, but she knew his distress was real. And that her resentment of it wasn’t really about him as much as the raw idiocy playing out near the transit ring. She took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly between her teeth.

“I feel stupid,” she said. “I really thought we were a scientific mission.”

“Aren’t we?”

She pointed one thumb toward the monitor. “That’s not science. ‘Light shit on fire and see what happens’ isn’t science. This is throwing dynamite into a pond to see if any fish float to the top.”

“So … natural philosophy?”

“Military bullshit. Solving every problem by trying to blow it up.”

“Yeah,” Fayez said. “Almost makes you wish you could quit, doesn’t it?”

Elvi pushed back from the monitor. In free fall, it was only a gesture that she was disengaging. Fayez’s dark eyes didn’t leave hers. “It wouldn’t be the first thing that made me think that.”

“But.”

“I know. If it wasn’t us,” she said, “it would be someone else. Someone who didn’t know as much as we do. It’s just …”

“You think whatever’s on the other side will hit back?”

“Yes. Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t like things that can only happen once. You can’t make sense of something when there’s no pattern. One data point is the same as none.”

“Would you feel better if the big man committed to doing this again a few dozen times?”

A couple billion kilometers away, the drive lit up for a moment, flickered, and went out.

“I think he did.”

Elvi wasn’t sure what the atmosphere on the science deck really was. She wanted to think that everyone else was just as uncomfortable with Sagale’s plan and, like her, staying as quiet about it. But the truth was that Jen and Travon looked excited. Their screens showed the inputs from a dozen probes and arrays scattered through the local void and three countdown timers. The first timer showed the time—down to minutes now—when the first ship would pass through the gate and, hopefully, into oblivion. Trailing that by only a few seconds, the timer for the second ship—the bomb ship—that would follow it. And then with three full minutes more, the detonation clock.

They were too far away to disarm the antimatter bomb. Making sure the experiment failed safe if it failed would be up to Medina Station. If the bomb ship somehow actually made the transit into the gate network, Medina would shut it down without detonation. The Falcon, almost a light-hour away, was watching literal nothingness for signs that the thing beyond the gates—the thing inside them—had even noticed what they’d done.

“You know what would be funny?” Fayez said. “If this whole blowing-things-up plan broke the gate and we were all trapped here on this ship for the rest of our lives with no way home.”

Sagale glowered and cleared his throat.

“You’re right,” Fayez said. “Too soon.”

The first counter fell to zero, turned from blue time-to-transit to red time-since-transit. In an hour they would see it happen, hear the tech ship’s report. In the vast emptiness, all they had was the assumption that the plan had actually gone forward.

“Everyone strap in,” Sagale said. “If the enemy fires another of those void bullets at the system, we may lose consciousness for a time.”

Jen and Travon put on their restraints. Elvi already had hers on. Twice before, she’d lived through the consciousness-breaking backlash of pissing off whatever had murdered the protomolecule. Once on Ilus with an army of alien bug-robots ready to cut her down, once sitting on a couch in a waiting room on Luna watching the newsfeeds as the Tempest prepared to annihilate Pallas Station. She was almost used to it at this point, or that was what she told herself. Still, she wasn’t looking forward to doing it again. The second timer zeroed. The bomb ship was through the gate. Presumably it had gone dutchman too.

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 water-color 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 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.