Elvi didn’t mind space, but the one thing it lacked that she needed right then was the ability to collapse into a chair. She felt a rush of adrenaline that made her hands tingle and her legs go numb.
“So they’re echoing each other?”
“Like looking in a mirror.”
“Oh,” she said. Then, “Okay. That’s huge.”
“Oh, it gets huger,” Fayez said. “All across the object we’re now seeing radiation hotspots”—he zoomed in on one, and a new rush of numerical data splashed across the image—“like this.”
He was looking at her expectantly. Waiting for her to make the connection. She didn’t think she was all that tired, but whatever flash of insight he was looking for just wasn’t there.
“I give up.”
“It took us a minute too,” Fayez said. He pulled up a third image. Elvi recognized a ring gate. “This is the same kind of radiation that sprays out of the gate during a transit.”
Almost before the numbers hit her screen Elvi had it. “That correlated to the catalyst.”
“Yes. Catalyst brain, green diamond-thing copy, and weird distributed gate-like radiation. Three things, all with the same pattern,” Fayez said.
Elvi pulled the image of the huge green diamond back until she could see the whole thing at once. It seemed to flicker with tiny stars of light appearing and disappearing where the computer marked the radiation spikes for her.
“This thing is filled with … gates? Like, in the physical structure of the object itself?”
“We have a theory,” Fayez said. He was grinning like he had the first time she agreed to sleep with him. He was a goofball, but she liked what made him happy: knowing things, and her.
“It’s too early for theories,” she said.
“I know, but we have one anyway. And by we, I mean Travon first, but we’re all on board. This thing comes in contact with a protomolecule-infected mind, it makes a copy of that mind, then these gate signatures start showing up all over the object. Travon starts talking about how secure data storage works. You take the physical imprint that’s the encoded data and you scatter it. You put it in a bunch of discrete storage locations with tags and code built in so that if any portion of the storage system is lost, the rest of it knows how to rebuild the lost portion from the scattered fragments.”
Elvi, who was a lot more computer literate than Fayez, started, “That’s not exactly—”
“So then Jen says, ‘A diamond is a super-dense and incredibly regularly structured mass of carbon atoms. If you had a way to shift things around without damaging the overall structure, it’d make a great data storage material.’ ”
Elvi paused, her mind ticking through the implications.
“A way like tiny, tiny wormholes,” Elvi said.
“Right? We know that the protomolecule builders seem to have had a hive mind. Or one brain. However you want to parse that. Instantaneous nonlocalized communication across all the various nodes and entities, all across their corner of galaxy. But shit happens, even to them. Asteroids hit planets or earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever. Anything that’s stored in a single node is lost forever when that node is destroyed. So what if what we’re looking at is the backup drive for their entire civilization? Everything they ever knew, packed into a carbon lattice the size of Jupiter?”
“That,” Elvi said, “is one gigantic fucking logical leap.”
“Yeah.” He nodded, but his grin remained undiminished. “Totally unfounded. Complete guesswork. We’ll need generations of scientific studies to verify what this thing is, and then generations more to crack the code on how to dig out the data, if any such data exists.
“But Els,” he said, almost breathless with excitement. “I mean, what if?”
Admiral Sagale floated beside his desk, looking over navigational charts on a large wall display. Elvi could see a course plotted from their current position, through the Kalma gate and into the hub, then out again through the Tecoma gate and into the next dead system on their galactic tour.
“Tell me that this system is the most important scientific discovery of all time,” Sagale said, not even looking up when she floated into his office.
“It might very well—” Elvi started.
“But the big crystal flower in Naraka system was the most important discovery.”
“It was an astonishing artifact,” Elvi agreed. “But compared to—”
“Before that, it was the trinary star system in Charon, and the planet where it rained glass shards.”
“That was more just really cool. You have to admit, it was pretty spectacular.”
He turned to give her his full attention.
“I’m hearing you say—once again—that there are artifacts in this system that are critical to future investigation,” Sagale said. He seemed weary, and vaguely disappointed. “Just like the big crystal flower.”
Elvi went through it for him, and as she said it, Fayez’s theory seemed more and more plausible. Sagale stared at her through half-closed eyes as she spoke. When she told him that the diamond outside might actually house every piece of information the gate network builders had ever had, a muscle in his cheek twitched, but that was his only sign of surprise.
“That is interesting. Please write up that theory and include it with the data dump when we send everything back to Laconia during the transit. I apologize for lumping this in with the flowers and glass rain. This actually does seem impressive.”
His grudging admission stung a little, but she let it go.
“Sir,” Elvi said. “Met, this might be everything the high consul sent us on this mission to find. This might be it.”
“It is not,” Sagale said, but she pushed on.
“I strongly encourage you to send word back to the admiralty asking for more time. There are a thousand more tests we can be running while we wait for additional personnel and ships to join us. Leaving now gains us nothing.”
“And you believe you will be able to access this data if I give you that time?” Sagale said.
Elvi almost lied, hungry for the chance to stay a little while longer and learn a little bit more, but …
“No. I can’t say that. In fact, it will almost certainly be the work of decades, maybe centuries, to solve this problem. If it even is solvable. But this is our best shot. Nothing we find in Tecoma will be as important as this. I feel pretty safe guaranteeing that.”
“Then we’ll keep to our schedule, and see whether you’re right,” Sagale said, already turning away. “Get secured. We burn for Tecoma in eighty minutes.”
Seventy-eight minutes later, Elvi lay in her crash couch, waiting to drown.
The problem with space travel had always—from the very beginning—been the fragility of human bodies. In spite of these limitations, humanity had done itself pretty proud even before Laconia. Now they were improving by leaps and bounds. The Falcon could make the travel time from one system to another almost trivial by comparison to the standard science vessels and freighters of the civilian fleet. A journey of weeks could be accomplished in days. The Falcon would even give most of Duarte’s military ships a run for their money. But the price of all that acceleration was the full-submersion crash couch. A diabolical device that completely surrounded the human body in shock-absorbing gel, and filled the lungs with highly oxygenated fluid to make the chest cavity as incompressible as possible. For days.
“I don’t understand what he wants,” she said.
“He is a complicated man,” Fayez said from the couch next to hers.
“It’s like he doesn’t want us to find anything interesting. Every time we do, he gets grumpy.”