“Those smudges of instability around the lens—they are thick cosmic vortexes yet they are whipping and transforming around it like lightning,” van der Voort commented. “Fascinating.”
“Those are our natural wormholes, or perhaps they’re the wormhole at different points in space-time. Nobody is really certain,” Doctor Takamura explained. “My mentor, Natori Yamaguchi, spent his entire life and career trying to explain and analyze this instability. To tell you even what he and his colleagues believed would take too long and require that most of you go back for your doctorates in astrophysics, particle physics, and perhaps cosmology. In simple terms, though, he believed that what you are looking at might well be caused by a peculiar structure never before observed but long known to exist called a boltzmon. It is a black hole reduced to the point where it cannot exist anymore. Most of them open up holes in space-time and are believed to simply fall through. The Lens is but an artifact of that collapse, which may well be in some distant galaxy.”
“Where does this—boltzmon—fall through?” Harker asked.
“Nobody knows. Another universe, perhaps, or other dimensions. This one, however, so we infer from the surrounding matter, seems to have gotten itself stuck in a loop or bubble in space-time. It keeps falling into the hole, but it appears to not quite make it before time curves back so it keeps falling again, and so on. That is why the `eye,’ so to speak, appears to shift, or blink, in two stages. At least, that is the prevailing theory. This temporal loop is the cause of the microlens, and is also causing other previously unobserved phenomena, such as the generation of the wormhole or wormholes, and the spewing out of particle strings. Strings we’ve encountered before, but not like these. For one thing, they seem to be attracted to and go right up the center of the wormholes. They may be part of one and the same thing. In a better and more merciful universe, I and countless of my colleagues would be studying and measuring and experimenting and getting to understand this rather than theorizing about it. All I can tell you right now for sure is that if we energized the cap we have on the wormhole in this region, a fingerlike string of particles the likes of which we’ve never seen before would shoot out at essentially the speed of light. Its properties are—bizarre, as is its parent.”
“I can guess,” Harker replied. “But it doesn’t tell me what this place does.”
“This place?” Juanita Krill took over once more. “This place is where specially shielded, specially reinforcing gates can be turned on and off. That was, at least, the theory when it was built, but it’s never been fully operational and we are dealing with a phenomenon without precedent. For a century theoreticians have run models trying to explain and understand it, and I’ve given you a very simplified version of some of the more popular theories, but the important thing is, nobody knows. That’s because the only way to get to the Lens artifact is from areas now deep within Titan-occupied space. We can’t measure it and we can’t play with it. The money involved in just getting this far was cut from The Confederacy budget in the early fights over how best to meet the Titan threat. Much of it went into conventional weaponry that could be more quickly and cheaply built and deployed—or on worlds of influential politicians. They couldn’t afford research on an idea that might be no more than a scientific curiosity. Only the Karas family, which made its fortune building genhole plates and gates, saw its potential as a weapon. And as the futility of conventional arms and tactics was made clear, and the Titan advance clearly turned in this direction, and the direction of a dozen other worlds built as preserves by great industrial families or corporations, they decided to act on their own to try and save their worlds.”
“The Karas family sold everything, pretty much, save the ships and factories it would need, and hired the finest particle physicists and greatest engineers to come here and do what they could,” Father Chicanis added. “Among them were Professor Yamaguchi and, in the final marriage of theory to weapon, the mathematical genius of Marcus Lin, Doctor van der Voort’s chief in later years. Several fortunes were poured into this, but what could they do? They couldn’t move out so many billions of people in so short a time. There weren’t the ships and there weren’t places to put them, and there was a great deal of resistance to evacuation—denial, you might call it, up until things were imminent, by which time it was far too late.”
“But how could they expect this—apparatus to work?” van der Voort asked. He wasn’t the only one metaphorically shaking his head. “Untested, theoretical, forces explained only in computer models among theoreticians?”
“Not precisely, Doctor,” Takamura responded. “Remember, we found the other end of this occurring naturally. I know the theory, and though I cannot even conceive that they actually were able to build something that could cap it, they did. Sygolin 37, the material we use to line genholes, the artificial wormholes that we use for interstellar travel, is synthesized from purely theoretical models of substances found near the event horizons of black holes. They are theoretical because, like going to the surface of a Titan-occupied world, it is rather easy to get there but so far impossible to get back. Yet the theory worked. We made the plasma, it works, and we are here. With a slight adjustment, it was sufficient to cap the hole. Time has no real meaning inside one, so the string coming down the center of this hole is simply, well, there, waiting for an exit into true space-time so that it can continue. That was tested, before the Titans came. And because it was spewing out before we capped it, we know what happens when it strikes something.”
“Yes?” Harker prompted. This was now something he could follow.
“It simply goes through, almost like a neutrino, and within the blink of an eye it has changed into more familiar particles and come apart. But in that moment when it penetrates, the most amazing thing happens. The string—which is incredibly fine, almost microscopic in thickness—does absolutely nothing. The effect, however, of its penetration on the matter and energy on all sides of it is something else again. This is ripped, torn, and shredded in space-time. It’s a rather local effect, but it is devastating. Rapid opening and closing creates short bursts that can rend the very fabric of space-time itself in the area immediately around the penetration point. Once it emerges into true space, only Sygolin 37 appears able to affect it, and then only to divert it. The Titans do not travel by wormholes. They use a method we know nothing about. There is nothing even resembling Sygolin 37 in their ships, bases, or artifacts. They use a system of building with energy flux that remains beyond us. We have no idea how they do it. But it definitely obeys the basic laws of the physical universe.”
“You’re sure of that, are you?” Harker pressed.
“You do not have to know why gravity works to know how it works. Yes, we are sure. If we could maintain full energy on our ships and weapons, we could hurt them. The thing is, we can’t. Their system dampens everything, drains the bulk. We think they don’t actually use it—that this effect is there not to guard against us, but rather to keep their own systems pure. The beauty of using the string from Priam’s Lens is that we don’t believe they can dampen it nor contain it. It would be too fast and too vicious, and its very passage would create massive instabilities in their structures. If we could unleash just a burst or two, even for fractions of a second, at any of those bases down there, we believe that their entire grid would collapse. They are interconnected—base to base, pole to pole, nexus to nexus. If one goes, the feedback alone through their systems might destabilize the rest. If their grid comes down, then their damping fields also come down.”