“Which Earth will have been doing too,” Ashford said.
“Without doubt, sir,” Chan said.
Like any ritual, the staff meeting carried more significance than information. The heads of all the major branches of the Behemoth’s structural tree were present: Sam for engineering, Bull for security, Chan for the research teams, Bennie Cortland-Mapu for health services, Anamarie Ruiz for infrastructure, and so on, filling the two dozen seats around the great conference table. Ashford sat in the place of honor, another beneficent Christ painted on the wall behind him. Pa sat at his right hand, and Bull—by tradition—at his left.
“What have we got?” Ashford said. “Short form.”
“It’s fucking weird, sir,” Chan said, and everyone chuckled. “Our best analysis is that the Ring is an artificially sustained Einstein-Rosen bridge. You go through the Ring, you don’t come out the other side here.”
“So it’s a gate,” Ashford said.
“Yes, sir. It appears that the protomolecule or Phoebe bug or whatever you want to call it was launched at the solar system several billion years ago, aiming for Earth with the intention of hijacking primitive life to build a gateway. We’re positing that whoever created the protomolecule did it as a first step toward making travel to the solar system more convenient and practical later.”
Bull took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was what everyone had been thinking, but hearing it spoken in this official setting made it seem more real. The Ring was a way for something to get here. Not just a gateway. A beachhead.
“When the Y Que went through it, the mass and velocity of the ship triggered some mechanism in the Ring,” Chan said. “The Martians have a good dataset from the moment it happened, and there was a massive outpouring of energy within the Ring structure and a whole cascade of microlevel conformation changes. The entire object went up to about five thousand degrees Kelvin, and it has been cooling regularly ever since. So it took a lot of effort to get that thing running, but it looks like not much to maintain.”
“What do we know about what’s on the other side?” Pa asked. Her expression was neutral, her voice pleasant and unemotional. She could have been asking him to justify a line item in his budget.
“It’s hard to know much,” Chan said. “We’re peeking through a keyhole, and the Ring itself seems to be generating interference and radiation that makes getting consistent readings difficult. We know the Y Que wasn’t destroyed. We’re still getting the video feed that the kid was spewing when he went through, it’s just not showing us much.”
“Stars?” Ashford said. “Something we can start to navigate from?”
“No, sir,” Chan said. “The far side of the Ring doesn’t have any stars, and the background microwave radiation is significantly different from what we’d expect.”
“Meaning what?” Ashford said.
“Meaning, ‘Huh, that’s weird,’” Chan said. “Sir.”
Ashford’s smile was cool as he motioned the science officer to continue. Chan coughed before he went on.
“We have a couple of other anomalies that we aren’t quite sure what to make of. It looks like there’s a maximum speed on the other side.”
“Can you unpack that, please?” Pa said.
“The Y Que went through the Ring going very fast,” Chan said. “About seven-tenths of a second after it reached the other side, it started a massive deceleration. Bled off almost all its speed in about five seconds. It looks like the nearly instant deceleration was what killed the pilot. Since then, it seems as if the ship is being moved out away from the Ring and deeper into whatever’s on the other side.”
“We know that when the protomolecule’s active, it’s been able to… alter what we’d expect from inertia,” Sam said. “Is that how it stopped the ship?”
“That’s entirely possible,” Chan said. “Mars has been pitching probes through the Ring, and it looks like we start seeing the effect right around six hundred meters per second. Under that, mass behaves just the way we expect it to. Over that, it stops dead and then moves off in approximately the same direction that the Y Que is going.”
Sam whistled under her breath.
“That’s really slow,” she said. “The main drives would be almost useless.”
“It’s slower than a rifle shot,” Chan said. “The good news is it only affects mass above the quantum level. The electromagnetic spectrum seems to behave normally, including visible light.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Sam said.
“What else are the probes telling us?”
“There’s something out there,” Chan said, and for the first time a sense of dread leaked into his voice. “The probes are seeing objects. Large ones. But there’s not much light except what we’re shining through the Ring or mounting on the probes. And, as I said, the Ring has always given inconsistent returns. If whatever’s in there is made of the same stuff, who knows?”
“Ships?” Ashford said.
“Maybe.”
“How many?”
“Over a hundred, under a hundred thousand. Probably.”
Bull leaned forward, his elbows on the table. Ashford and Pa were looking around the table at the graying faces. They’d known before, because they weren’t going to wait for a staff meeting to get their information. Now they were judging the reactions. So he’d give them a reaction. Control the fall.
“Be weirder if there wasn’t anything there. If it was an attack fleet, they’d have attacked by now.”
“Yeah,” Ruiz said, latching on to the words.
Ashford opened the floor for questions. How many probes had Mars fired through? How long would it take something going at six hundred meters per second to reach one of the structures? Had they tried sending small probes in? Had there been any contact from the protomolecule itself, the stolen voices of humans, the way there had been with Eros? Chan did his best to be reassuring without actually having anything more that he could say. Bull assumed there was a deeper report that Ashford and Pa were getting, and he wondered what was in it. Being kept out chafed.
“All right. This is all interesting, but it’s not our focus,” Ashford said, bringing the Q-and-A session to a halt. “We’re not here to send probes through the Ring. We’re not here to start a fight. We’re just making sure that whatever the inner planets do, we’re at the table. If something comes out of the Ring, we’ll worry about it then.”
“Yes, sir,” Bull said, throwing his own weight behind Ashford’s. It wasn’t like there was another strategy. Better that the crew see them all unified. People were watching how this all came down, and not just the crew.
“Mister Pa?” Ashford said. The XO nodded and glanced at Bull. Instinct dropped a weight in his gut.
“There have been some irregularities in the ship’s accounting structure,” Pa said. “Chief Engineer Rosenberg?”
Sam nodded, surprise on her face. “XO?” she said.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to restrict you to quarters and revoke your access privileges until this is all clarified. Chief Watanabe will relieve you. Mister Baca, you’ll see to it.”
The room was just as silent, but the meaning behind it was different now. Sam’s eyes were wide with disbelief and rising fury.
“Excuse me?” she said. Pa met her gaze coolly, and Bull understood all of it in an instant.
“Records show you’ve been drawing resources from work and materials budgets that weren’t appropriate,” Pa said, “and until the matter is resolved—”