“That’s impossible,” Tarrischall snapped back. “She had to clear!”
“She hasn’t,” the Voice-of-Physics replied impatiently. “I am still registering mass inside the channel. Movement rate null. The raft must be caught between the magnetic lobes of the channel mouths.”
On the far viewer, the black sphere of the channel event horizon continued to hover blandly at the center of the web-work tube of the perimeter grid. Invisible within that sphere, however, the cargo raft was still present, coexistent dimensionally not only within River-’Tween-Worlds but at the Earth Worm Gate as well.
“Voice-of-Physics, what happens if we can’t clear the channel? What happens when we have to reduce the power flow?”
“I don’t know,” Narisara replied. “We have never attempted such a simulation.”
“Guess!”
“Tarrischall, I can’t! The matter inside the channel is dimensionally unstable. I cannot project how it will react to a channel contraction. Possibly as a quantum material.
Possibly as tridimensional. I can’t tell!”
“Differentiation!
“As quantum material it may disperse out along the residual thread of the channel, leaking back into tri-space as a few extra ultimotes per lype of interstellar gas.”
“As trimaterial?”
“You will be compressing a hundred and eighty thousand kyhar of mass down to a point you could balance on a pup’s claw tip.”
Tarrischall felt his whiskers bristle. “To say more simply, POOYGH!”
Narisara gave an affirmative toss of her shapely head. “A mass explosion such as no one has ever imagined. We would burn brighter than the Life-Fire-of-All-Things.”
“Where’s my power!” Marta called in a half-scream to her Energy Boss.
“They’re trying to get authorization from the Ces-Lunar Grid Authority now, ma’am,” the thoroughly unhappy techno yelled back over his shoulder.
“Damn it, I’m the authority! Tell those idiots to check their disaster protocols. A Worm Gate emergency has absolute priority over everything except basic life support, and we are declaring a gate emergency! Tell them we could lose the wormhole and the whole bloody L-2 complex if we don’t get that power shift immediately!”
“Doing it, ma’am!”
“L-2 traffic control on red command channel, ma’am,” Communications cut in. “They acknowledge your crisis declaration and are standing by for instructions.”
“Tell them to initiate immediate dispersal of the complex by Plan Red Roger. Clear all nonessential manned vessels and platforms out of this traffic block with all speed and keep them out until we can get a handle on this thing.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
On the big display, the city in the sky was already disintegrating, its component stations leaving their formation within the Lagrange point. With attitude control thrusters and docked tug engines blazing to haul them clear, the awkward voyagers were drifting outward in a slow motion bomb burst that left the Worm Gate and gate control wheel alone in a growing volume of empty space.
“We’re starting to get some power supplementation from Ces-Lunar already, Marta,”
Rocardo reported, “but we are still trending negative on our accumulator reserves. Can we fade back a little? Let the hole contract a bit to conserve power.”
Lane shook her head, eyeing the sphere of blackness hovering within the perimeter grid.
“We have sixty thousand metric tons of mass out there locked in trans-state, Estiban. If we try altering the variables on that much malleable matter, I don’t know what will happen. Nobody else does either.”
“Headquarters has triggered a net crisis conference,” the Assistant Director replied, sounding hopeful. “They’re bringing in every physicist in the field to work the problem.”
“And maybe they’ll come up with some answers in six months or so. We don’t have that much time. Power levels?”
“Down to twelve per on all reserves.”
“Dr. Lane, I have an idea,” the tug controller spoke up.
“Go, Fred.”
“Why don’t we try and shove the barge out of there? I could send one of our big Miki T-5s into the hole. I know all of its systems would go down as it crossed the event horizon, but we could back it off and run it in at full thrust with a load of momentum built up. It’d wreck the tug, but it might be enough to knock the barge out the other side.”
Marta turned the suggestion over in her mind examining it from all angles, then shook her head. “No, that might work under simple Newtonian physics but we’re operating quantum here. While we know individual atoms can maintain momentum in trans-state, nobody can say if momentum can be kinetically transmitted.
“If we ram a tug into the hole, it might just pass right through the barge’s dimensionally irrational form and go right out the other side. On the other hand, there might be enough nuclear forces interaction for the barge’s mass to not only absorb the tug’s momentum but its physical structure as well. The two vehicles could merge with an overlap on the subatomic levels. Two objects can’t occupy the same space, in the nonquantum universe at any rate. When they came out of trans-state at Life-Waters, there could be a mass explosion that could vaporize the whole gate.”
“Lord and Lady!” The tug controller murmured. He liked the People, too.
“We’ve got no choice, Estiban,” Lane stated to her Assistant Director, making her final decision in the matter. “If we get down to four percent reserve without stabilization, we’re going to cut the negative energy fields and dump the hole.”
For a Gate Controller, those words were blasphemy. “You can’t be serious!” Rocardo exclaimed, “It took ten years to isolate and fix a properly oriented wormhole for the 359 system. If we dump the hole…”
“I know. If we dump the hole, it’s gone. We’ll never get it back. We may never acquire another one for Wolf system either. But if we can keep the physical gate structure intact, we’ll at least have chance to try again. If we destroy the gates, that chance will be gone, too. Power?”
Rocardo replied by looking down at his station displays. “Now down to nine per on the reserves.”
The string-of-gem city lights on the night side of Life-Waters were blinking out, fading as the orbital light-power-gatherers that fed the People’s civilization shifted their flow rays on River-’Tween-Worlds, a half cone of raw energy flooding across space and through the overloading absorption structures.
Tarrischall rode the power tasking pallet himself, nursing the straining systems like a caregiver with a sick pup, rolling each control rod with an extended claw tip. “Smoothly, smoothly,” he murmured to himself, staring into the data bubble, “I-lick-your-fur, sweet one. Steady down and quit twitching on me.”
All others in the Gathering-of-Voices were silent save for Narisara. Bouncing back and forth between her display and that of the Voice-of-Decision, she maintained Tarrischall’s situational awareness.
“Evacuation of orbit zone continuing… Voices-of-Central-Energy acknowledge the Word-of-Crisis. We have priority flow in all channels.”
“Praise to a sane bureaucrat. Thermal grade on receptor arrays?”
“Nothing is melting yet and that’s all that can be said.”
“And how are the Uprights doing?”
“As well as we are, I must presume. I detect a slight structural flux from their end, but so far the channel holds open.” She looked across at Tarrischall. “I speak as Voice-of-Physics. The wisdom is to cast loose and abandon the channel. There is great danger here and I can see no resolution.”
“No! This fish hasn’t escaped yet!”
“Tarrischall-of-the-Crystal-Springs,” Narisara’s voice softened, speaking as herself and not the Voice-of-Physics. “What avails catching the fish if one drowns doing it?”