He closed up the cream jar and put it away while she started pulling on her clothes.
“So what were they thinking?” Elvi said.
“Hmm?”
“Making a neutron star so big it’s hovering on the edge of collapse, and then clearing everything out of the system so that it doesn’t. Moving the ring out of the ecliptic.”
“You think they made a neutron star? Seems more likely they just built a gate to a dud system.”
“How? There had to be life here for them to hijack, or the gate wouldn’t have been built. This was a living system like Sol that got turned into …” She waved her hand.
“Yeah,” Fayez agreed. “I don’t know. Honestly, this miracles-and-wonders thing feels like drinking from a fire hose sometimes.”
Elvi finished with her uniform, then brushed her teeth as Fayez waited and watched her. She gave herself one last critical look in the mirror, then said, “Let’s go see the boss.”
Fayez grabbed her and undid her careful uniform straightening with a hug. “Thanks for not dying, Els.”
Forty-eight hours later, they’d gone through the drill. The ship’s system had analyzed the telescopic data. Elvi had gone to pay her respects to the catalyst the way she always did, and then performed the experiment. The protomolecule reached out, and the data streamed in. The Falcon searching for any change, any effect. This time, Elvi actually let herself sleep in between. Near-death experiences wore her out, apparently, even if she hadn’t been aware of them at the time. In addition to which, this time, there wasn’t much to see.
When they’d finished their analysis, Sagale came to the bridge and braced himself on one hand-hold and one foot-hold. His eyes shifted from one screen to the next, taking in the data streams with an air of pleasure.
“Mehmet,” Elvi said.
“Major Okoye,” Sagale said, and nodded toward the main monitor. Magnified so that it filled the screen, the tiny but massive star was the only object within nearly two light-years of the Tecoma gate. “Tell me that this system is the most important scientific discovery of all time.”
“No,” Elvi replied. “Pretty sure the big green diamond still wins that prize. But it is amazing.”
The neutron star on the screen was too hot to radiate much energy as visible light, but the screen still had to dim it down to keep it from blinding everyone in the room.
“More than three stellar masses stuffed into a ball half the size of Rhode Island,” Jen said.
“What’s a road island?” Travon asked. He’d been a Martian, back before they were all Laconians.
“Major Okoye,” Sagale said, ignoring the banter. “Am I correct that this is exactly what it looks like? A single unusable star in a system devoid of other artifacts or exploitable planets?”
Something in his tone caught Elvi’s attention. It had a stiff formality to it. As though he were asking her questions under oath. She felt like they were engaging in some sort of ritual that he understood and she didn’t.
“That’s what it looks like,” she said carefully. “Yes.”
Sagale nodded his massive head at her. The pleasure seemed to radiate from him. “Come to my office in five minutes.”
He pulled himself away, disappearing down the corridor. Fayez met her gaze and lifted an eyebrow.
“Makes me nervous too,” she said.
She checked the data one last time like she was going over her class notes before a test. She had a sense that there was something in it she’d overlooked. It wasn’t a feeling she liked.
“Coffee?” Sagale asked when she arrived. He was floating next to the beverage machine inset in one of the bulkheads of his office. Two drinking bulbs drifted next to him. It was the first time he’d ever offered her anything in hospitality. It made her nervous.
“Sure,” she said so that he wouldn’t notice.
The machine hissed as it injected cups of coffee into the bulbs, one at a time. “Sweetener? Whitener?” Sagale asked, still fussing with the machine.
“No.”
Sagale turned to her and gently pushed one of the bulbs in her direction. She caught it and depressed the bubble on the lid that opened the flow to the drinking tube, then took a sip. The coffee was just right, hot but not scalding, bitter and strong and vaguely nutty.
“Thank you,” she said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I want to extend the thanks of the Laconian Empire for your work on this project. Now that we have identified a system of no utility, we are moving to the military phase of the operation,” Sagale said after a short pause while he sipped at his coffee.
“The what?”
“Two ships are entering this system as we speak,” he said. “They are both uncrewed, and controlled remotely from this vessel. Both are large freighters. One is empty. The other has a payload.”
“A payload?”
“The high consul has been able to use the construction platforms over Laconia to isolate and contain antimatter. The second ship is carrying slightly over twenty kilograms in a magnetic containment device.”
Elvi felt light-headed again. Maybe she was still recovering from her near-death experience. Maybe it was her superior officer telling her that he had enough explosive power to glass the surface of a planet. Probably it was both. She took a moment to get her breath back.
“And why?” she asked.
“The high consul’s directive for this expedition was twofold,” Sagale said. “The first was the mission you were briefed about. You and your team have done all that could be asked in this effort, and my reports back to naval command reflect this.”
“Okay. Thanks. What was the second thing?” Elvi asked.
“The second aspect of this mission is outside your expertise, which is why it was kept on a need-to-know basis. We were to find a gate-connected system with minimal value. Such as this one.”
She let go of the coffee bulb, and it began gently floating away. “Am I allowed to know what phase two is? Because if I don’t need to know, it seems sort of mean to have this conversation.”
“You are. In fact you are essential to it, and I have every confidence that you will continue to excel as our mission changes, though you will no longer have operational command,” Sagale said. There was something like sympathy in his eyes. For the very first time, Elvi got the sense that Sagale liked her. Or at least respected her. “The high consul’s first priority is to find a way to defend humanity against whatever destroyed the gate builders.” He paused for a moment like he didn’t quite believe what he was about to say. Like he’d been waiting for a long time to say it. “The test we are about to perform is the beginning of that process.”
He tapped at his desk, and a map of the Tecoma system appeared above it. The neutron star at its center, the distant gate, the Falcon floating at the midway point, and the two new freighters drifting near the entry point.
“We are going to monitor this system with every instrument at our disposal, just as we always have,” Sagale said. “But this time, out in the hub network, traffic control is running ships through the gates until the energy transfer load reaches the critical state. When the critical level is reached, we are going to transit the empty freighter from this system.”
“You’re going to deliberately dutchman a ship?”
“We are. When it vanishes, and while the energy transfer load is still high enough to make transits impossible, I will set the trigger on the antimatter containment field and transit the second ship. It too should vanish, but it will have a timer set to detonate the load.”
Elvi felt her stomach cramp up like he’d punched her in the solar plexus. It was suddenly hard to breathe.
“Why would you—”
“Because one of two things is true,” Sagale said. “Either there is an intelligence that lies beyond those gates that is making the choice to destroy our ships, or there is some natural effect of the gate system itself that does it. This is how we will determine that.”