Elvi reached for a handhold in the bulkhead behind her, and pulled herself to the wall. Her heart was going faster.
“You think you can kill them?”
“That isn’t the issue. Whether something on the other side dies or doesn’t die, what matters is that it is punished. After this experiment, some time later we will run the energy up to the point of another dutchman and see if the ship is taken. If the ship survives transit, we will know the bomb convinced our opponent to change their stance toward us.”
“That’s a terrible plan.”
“If it does change, we’ll know the enemy is capable of change. That it’s intentional, and possibly intelligent. If not, we’ll repeat the test until we’re reasonably certain that no change will be forthcoming. I take it from your expression that you have some thoughts on the mission you’d like to share.”
Elvi’s voice sounded outraged, even to her. “The last time we made them angry, they turned off every consciousness in the Sol system and there was a massive surge in virtual particle activity. They fired a bullet that broke spooky interactions in ways we’re still trying to make sense of. Every one of those things defies our understanding of how reality works. So we’re going to throw a bomb at them?”
Sagale nodded, agreeing and dismissing her at the same time. “If we could send a sternly worded letter, we’d try that. But this is how you negotiate with something that you can’t speak to. When it does something we don’t like, we hurt it. Every time it does something we don’t like, we hurt it again. Only once. If it can understand cause and effect, it will get our message.”
“Jesus.”
“We aren’t the aggressor here. We didn’t hit anyone first. We just haven’t hit anyone back until now.”
She could hear Winston Duarte in the word choices. Even in the cadence Sagale delivered them with. It made Elvi want to throw her coffee bulb at his face. Fortunately, it had drifted several meters away, saving her from a court-martial.
“Thanks to you, we’ve found a sample system. This is the safest place in the empire for humanity to conduct these tests.”
“This is a bad, bad idea. I don’t think you’re hearing what I’m saying.”
“When humans first began experimenting with fission bombs,” Sagale said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “they used empty islands for their tests. Consider this our Bikini Atoll.”
Elvi laughed at him, but there was no humor in it.
“My God, you people really are this dumb,” she said. Sagale frowned at that, but she powered on anyway. “First of all, the Bikini Atoll wasn’t empty. The people that lived there had their homes stolen and were sent away. And the islands were filled with plant and animal life that was annihilated.”
“We have established that this system has nothing that—”
Elvi didn’t let him finish. “But putting that aside for a moment, I just said whatever lives inside those gates has a very different understanding of physics than we do. Is it limited to taking its anger out on only one solar system? You don’t know that. You can’t know that.”
“Passivity didn’t save the gate builders. It won’t save us. The high consul has considered the risks and judged a proactive, direct path to be the best option available.”
He spread his hands. What can be done? As if Duarte’s word were a force of nature, inescapable and unquestionable. It was like talking to a recording.
“You are about to run an n-equals-one experiment where one is the number of universes we can break trying to satisfy Duarte’s curiosity.”
Chapter Eleven: Alex
The shipyards on Callisto were a perfect example of the old idea that ships and buildings keep learning even after they’re built. History took whatever it found and used it for what was happening at the time, remaking the spaces into whatever worked well enough to get by at the moment, until history itself became a kind of architect.
Callisto had been a divided base once. Pretty much the same way medieval villages had been built just outside castle walls, civilian shipyards had grown up around the older MCRN base until the military and commercial concerns were almost the same size. The Free Navy had raided the Martian side even before the Free Navy really existed, pounding that half of the base into dust and bodies. Then, in the aftermath of the great defection that became the seeds of Laconia, the rebuilding of the Martian shipyards had been left incomplete. During the starving years, it had been abandoned. But the real estate was there, and as the need grew again, what had been military structures were taken over again. Nothing died without becoming the foundation for what came after.
They had been on Callisto for eight days so far, and it wasn’t certain when they’d ship back out. There were several of the big cargo ships in Sol system that might be able to smuggle the Storm, if that was what the underground decided to do next. Or maybe they’d stay in Sol. For all Laconia’s ambitions, there were still more people, stations, and ships in the Sol system than outside it. That was changing, though. Someday within Alex’s lifetime, they’d cross the threshold, and Sol really would be just one system among many. The oldest, most human system in the empire, sure. But not home. There would be a thousand homes, and if history was a guide, in a generation or two, everyone would think wherever they were was the most important one.
The restaurant Caspar had taken him to, for example, was in a reinforced dome that had clearly been Martian military construction. A supply depot, probably. Now all the fail-closed locks were gone, and the reinforced walls were hung with batiked cloth and the kind of tapestry that interior decorators churned out by the square meter. The menu billed itself as Moroccan, but the couscous was made with mushrooms and the beef all had the overly consistent grain that meant it had grown in a vat. The recipes might have had their roots on Earth, but Alex knew Belter food when he tasted it.
He and Caspar and the rest of the crew wore printed flight suits with a triangle-and-curve logo that implied they worked for a gas-mining cooperative called Három Állam that worked the Jovian moons. The Gathering Storm was hidden in a generations-old mine that was marked on the surveys as having been lost to collapse fifteen years before. It had been an OPA smuggling base, and the plan was to leave it there for a few weeks while the Laconian security forces were on high alert. Which meant, in the meantime, the crew could take a little time off the ship, drink, visit brothels, play golgo and handball and two-court football. Or fold up their legs on soft, woven cushions, listen to flute and drum music from hidden speakers, and scoop up little bits of fungus pretending to be wheat flour and cubes of spiced beef that had never been a cow.
Another advantage was that a little time on Callisto with civilians meant they could take the temperature of the system. See how everyone was reacting to the news of the underground’s attack. It turned out the response wasn’t what Alex had expected.
“Nothing?” Caspar said.
Alex cycled through the newsfeeds again. Food production on Earth and Ganymede were up this quarter, easily matching the established projections. A group in the Krasnoyarsk-Sakha Shared Interest Zone was petitioning for trade autonomy. The settlement on Navnan Ghar was reporting the discovery of a massive underground crystal network, and a special scientific commission was being assembled to determine whether it was another alien artifact or something that had occurred naturally on the planet. The lead singer of Tuva T.U.V.A. had sent nude photos of himself to an underage fan, and the authorities were investigating. The Laconian Science Directorate was reporting a potential breakthrough in the survey of dead systems: a massive green diamond that experts suspected might contain records that, if decoded, would spell out the history of the species that had created the ring gates.