This was getting a bit chummy for Conrad's taste. He did have a job to do, and experience had taught him that sentimentality and clear judgment were enemies far more often than they were allies. “Let's talk about the antimatter,” he said.
“It was an accident,” Chang answered, much too quickly. “The mass crusher out in the L-Belt got shut down as a money sink, but twelve years ago the king was still screaming for neutronium. ‘Neubles! Bring me neubles, you lazy ingrates!' And our plan seemed, you know, efficient. Hunting societies used every part of the buffalo, right? Which is not the least bit surprising, because what the hell else did they have?”
They walked through corridors tilted strangely against the artificial gravity. Some of the rock walls were polished mirror-smooth, a finish Conrad admired and also envied, since on P2 the chlorine etching—even indoors—would take the shine off a surface like that within a year. Other areas looked as though they'd been chipped out with picks and sledgehammers, which was also interesting though certainly less aesthetic. But the contrast told him more about the troubles here than Leonard Chang's flapping mouthparts ever could.
Anyway, Conrad waited patiently for further information, meanwhile attempting to piece this man's story together in his own head. There had been a demand for neubles, even as recently as that, in the now seemingly foolish hope that a collapsiter grid—true teleportation, systemwide—could rescue the colony from its logistical difficulties. And since there was not a single neutronium barge here in Barnard—not one ship capable of harvesting and squeezing the worthless dust of interplanetary space, of forming it into liquid neutronium and sheathing it in diamond spheres—there had long been talk of using mine tailings instead. Every part of the buffalo, yes: very little of what was dug from these tunnels was actually useful metal. The oxygen—a primary component of the residual tailings—could of course be sold as a consumable to the other space industries and facilities, or burned with hydrogen to produce water, which generally brought a slightly higher per-kilo price. But what did the colony need with more carbon, more silicon, more lithium and sulfur? Squeezing it into neutronium was a logical—if costly—alternative.
But Conrad had spent a bit of time on Mass Industries barges back in his youth—enough to know that you couldn't squeeze neutronium on any sort of piston or anvil. You could start that way—people generally did—but by itself that would never get you anywhere near the required pressures or densities. For that, you needed an antimatter explosion, and therefore more-than-modest supplies of stabilized positronium in quantum confinement. That was pretty much all Conrad knew, but it was enough for him to smell a rat, to sense the outlines of the trouble Leonard Chang had tried to conceal here.
“You thought you had escaped inquiry,” he probed. This was one of his stock phrases, and since almost everyone had something to hide somewhere along the way, it almost always yielded interesting results.
This time was no exception; Chang quickened his pace and got in front of Conrad, turning to look him straight in the eye. “Sir, our official report was truthful. There was an unintended explosion in the blasting chamber, fortunately mitigated by a suspension of carbonaceous dust in the air, which absorbed a lot of the gamma and X. Kept the asteroid from cracking into little shards, eh? But it involved all of our positronium. On my honor, I swear to you, every molecule of that material was accounted for.”
“Antimatter must never fall into the hands of noncertified personnel,” Conrad warned, though he still had no idea what was going on.
“It hasn't, sir, I swear to you. Our books and facilities are open to your inspection.”
“I know they are,” Conrad said seriously. And then, on a hunch, “You're taking me to the blasting chamber now?”
“Yes sir,” Chang said, “because I want you to understand. Other than the accident itself, we have been meticulous. When you've seen it I think you'll agree we've done all that we reasonably could.”
“Except tell the truth,” Conrad replied.
And Chang found something interesting down at his feet, and studied their backward stride a little before answering, “Aye. Except that.”
And here the corridor bent through a sharp turn whose floor seemed even more particularly tilted against the gravity, and from there it all opened out into a large chamber. Conrad's first thought was that it was a hundred meters or so across, but as he followed the bright lights fading off into the distance, he realized the chamber was in fact a polished sphere at least a kilometer in diameter. The blasting chamber, yes. Bigger than the interior of a neutronium barge, but certainly not too big for the job at hand: containing the explosive conversion of matter and antimatter into pure energy. And yet, for some reason at clear odds with this purpose, a sort of transparent axle or conduit ran from the ceiling of the sphere to the floor beneath—a hollow cylinder of diamond, bathed in white light. And at the center of this tube was a deformity of some sort: an invisible pinpoint distorting the view all around it, bending light rays into double and triple rainbows, puckering the entire geometry of the room.
Conrad cursed in his parents' Gaelic, which, being a passionate language, was finely honed for such things. Then, just to be sure, he cursed in Bascal's Tongan.
“Yeah,” said Chang, with probably as much rue as a man's voice could safely hold. “I know it.”
“You've been concealing a black hole in your mine. For twelve years.”
“We slipped a decimal point in the ordnance calculations,” Chang said defensively. “Well, we slipped several. But accidents happen everywhere, right? And I hasten to add, this is a safe black hole, relatively speaking. It's got about half a neuble's mass on it; so its event horizon is too small to swallow protons, obviously, or Element Pit wouldn't be here, and this conversation wouldn't be happening. We'd've been crushed through the eye of yonder needle within a few minutes of the accident that birthed it.”
“Uh-huh,” Conrad agreed, fighting hard not to appear surprised. Ideally, he should seem to be a step or two ahead of anything a rogue like Chang might do or say.
“But it can take in two or three electrons before the like-charge repulsion starts holding them out,” Chang went on, “so it's a charged particle, and an ordinary magnetic fusion bottle is sufficient to contain it. It's funny, if you think about it, that the charge of one electron can hold up a billion tons of mass. But it's a lucky thing, eh? Gravity is weak enough to be toyed with; electromagnetism just is.”
“This is a serious fuckup,” was all Conrad could think to say.
“Aye, sir. We're well aware.”
“I expect you are,” Conrad began, and would have launched into a longer lecture on the propriety of concealing one's fuckups from the authorities who might actually be able to do something about them. He would have done this, yes, had his curiosity not gotten the better of him. “What's the radius of that tube?” he asked instead.
Chang looked puzzled by the question. “About five meters. Why?” And then understanding dawned, and he said, “Up close, the gravity is about two gee. You can stand on the outside of the tube, yes, if you're right next to the node. It will attract you, but not crush you. The tube was sized specifically to prevent accidents of that sort. Let me tell you, sir, no one has ever been killed by that thing. Mining is a dangerous pastime with a hundred different ways to bite your ass, but that particular dragon is muzzled.”