Scorpio understood his reservations. Bilge management was a serious business aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, and the turning off of pumps was not something that was ever taken lightly. Once a deck had been flooded with the Captain’s chemical humours and exudations, it could be very difficult to reclaim it for human use. But what mattered more now was the calibration of the weapon. Turning off the pump made more sense than turning off the listening devices in that area. If losing three or four decks meant having a realistic hope of defeat-ing the pursuing wolves, it was a small price to pay.
The lights dimmed; even the constant background churn of bilge pumps became muted. The weapon was being discharged.
As the weapon rotated up to speed, it became a silent columnar blur of moving parts, a glittering whirlwind. In vacuum, it moved with frightening speed. Calculations had shown that it would only take the failure of one tiny part of the hypo-metric weapon to rip the Nostalgia for Infinity to pieces. Scorpio remembered the Conjoiners putting the thing together, taking such care, and now he understood why.
They followed the calibration instructions to the letter. Because their effects depended critically on atomic-scale tolerances, Remontoire had said, no two versions of the weapon could ever be exactly alike. Like handmade rifles, each would have its own distinct pull, an unavoidable effect of manufacture that had to be gauged and then compensated for. With a hypometric weapon it was not just a case of aiming-off to compensate—it was more a case of finding an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect within a locus of expectations. Once this pattern was determined, the weapon could in theory produce its effect almost anywhere, like a rifle able to fire in any direction.
Scorpio had already seen the weapon in action. He didn’t have to understand how it worked, only what it did. He had heard the sonic booms as spherical volumes of Ararat’s atmosphere were deleted from existence (or, conceivably, shifted or redistributed somewhere else). He had seen a hemispherical chunk of water removed from the sea, the memory of those in-rushing walls of water—even now—making him shiver at the sheer wrongness of what he had witnessed.
The technology, Remontoire had told him, was spectacularly dangerous and unpredictable. Even when it was properly constructed and calibrated, a hypometric weapon could still turn against its maker. It was a little like grasping a cobra by the tail and using it to lash out against enemies while hoping that the snake didn’t coil around and bite the hand that held it.
The trouble was, they needed that snake.
Thankfully, not all aspects of the h-weapon’s function were totally unpredictable. The range was limited to within light-hours of the weapon itself, and there was a tolerably well-defined relationship between weapon spin-rate (as measured by some parameter Scorpio didn’t even want to think about) and radial reach in a given direction. What was more difficult to predict was the direction in which the extinction bubble would be launched, and the resulting physical size of the bubble’s effect.
The testing procedure required the detection of an effect caused by the weapon’s discharge. On a planet, this would have presented no real difficulties: the weapon’s builders would simply tune the spin-rate to allow the effect to show itself at a safe distance, and then make some guess as to the size of the effect and the direction in which it would occur. After the weapon had been fired, they would examine the predicted zone of effect for any indication that a spherical bubble of space-time—including all the matter within it—had simply winked out of existence.
But in space it was much more difficult to calibrate a hypometric weapon. No sensors in existence could detect the disappearance of a few atoms of interstellar gas from a few cubic metres of vacuum. The only practical solution, therefore, was to try to calibrate the weapon within the ship itself. Of course, this was scarily dangerous: had the bubble appeared within the core of one of the Conjoiner drives, the ship would have been destroyed instantly. But the mid-flight calibration procedure had been done before, Remontoire had said, and none of his ships had been destroyed in the process.
The one thing they didn’t do was immediately select a target within the ship. They were aiming for an effect on the skin of the vessel, safely distant from any critical systems. The procedure, therefore, was to set the weapon’s initial coordinates to generate a small, unobserved extinction bubble beyond the hull. The weapon would then be fired repeatedly, with the spin-rate adjusted by a tiny amount each time, decreasing the radial distance and therefore drawing the bubble closer and closer to the hull. They couldn’t see it out there; they could only imagine it approaching, and could never be sure whether it was about to nibble the ship’s hull or was still hundreds of metres distant. It was like summoning a malevolent spirit to a seance: the mo-ment of arrival was a thing of both dread and anticipation.
The test area around the weapon had been sealed off right out to the skin of the ship, save for automated control systems. Everyone not already frozen had been moved as far away from the weapon as possible. After each firing—each squirming, rebounding collapse of the threshing mechanisms—Scorpio’s technicians pored over their data to see if the weapon had generated an effect, scanning the network of microphones and barometers to see if there was any hint that a spherical chunk of the ship a metre in diameter had just ceased to exist. And so the calibration process continued, the technicians tuning the weapon time and again and listening for results.
The lights dimmed again.
“Getting something,” the technician said, after a moment. Scorpio saw a cluster of red indicators appear on his read-out. “Signals coming in from…”
But the technician did not complete his sentence. His words were drowned out by a rising howl, a noise unlike anything Scorpio had ever heard aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. It was not the shriek of air escaping through a nearby breach, nor the groan of structural failure. It was much closer to a low, agonised vocalisation, to the sound of something huge and bestial being hurt.
The moan began to subside, like the dying after-rumble of a thunderclap.
“I think you have your effect,” Scorpio said.
He went down to see it for himself. It was much worse than he had feared: not a one-metre-wide nibble taken out of the ship, but a gaping fifteen-metre-wide wound, the edges where bulkheads and floors had been sheared gleaming a bright, untarnished silver. Greenish fluids were raining down through the cavity from severed feedlines; an electrical cable was thrashing back and forth in the void, gushing sparks each time it contacted a metallic surface.
It could have been worse, he told himself. The volume of the ship nipped out of the existence by the weapon had not coincided with any of the inhabited parts, nor had it intersected critical ship systems or the outer hull. There had been a slight local pressure loss as the air inside the volume ceased to exist, but, all told, the weapon had had a negligible effect on the ship. But it had unquestionably had an effect on the Captain. Some part of his vaguely mapped nervous system must have passed through this volume, and the weapon had evidently caused him pain. It was difficult to judge how severe that pain must have been, whether it had been transitory or Was even now continuing. Perhaps there was no exact analogue for it in human terms. If there was, Scorpio was not certain that he really wished to know, because for the first time a disturbing thought had occurred to him: if this was the pain the Captain felt when a tiny part, of the ship was harmed, what would it be like if something much worse happened?
Yes, it could have been worse.