Bobbie knelt back down next to the crate and very gingerly lifted one of the metal balls out, making sure to keep the cable connected to the power supply. Once it was out of its foam cradle, warning text could be seen. ENSURE MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT SYSTEM REMAINS CHARGED—DANGER OF EXPLOSION, it said. Another, smaller warning read, DO NOT RUN ON INTERNAL POWER SUPPLY FOR MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES. The labels on it were from the Laconian Science Directorate. Not military, except in that everything Laconian was military. Not usual ordnance, anyway. Nothing familiar.
Bobbie returned the sphere to its place in the foam. And sat back. Something in the spheres exploded when it wasn’t magnetically restrained. Fusion reactors worked that way. The magnetic bottle held the fusion reaction suspended because nothing material could handle the heat of the core. These little spheres weren’t reactors, though. A fusion reactor was huge. It required extensive support mechanisms to inject fuel pellets, compress and fuse those pellets, and turn the fusion reaction into electricity. The Laconians were advanced, but it didn’t seem plausible that they were so advanced that they’d created fusion reactors a little bigger than a softball. And these things were using power, not generating it.
She pulled out her terminal and called Rini Glaudin. She was an old Belter on the Storm. A high-energy physics PhD from way back in the day at Ceres Polytech who’d gotten radicalized in college and spent a couple of decades in a UN prison after she started helping the Voltaire Collective build bombs. Now she was the chief engineer and resident gearhead on the Storm.
“Boss,” Rini said after a couple moments. She sounded sleepy, or drunk.
“Catch you at a bad time?”
“You can leave now,” Rini said, but her voice was muffled, like she’d covered the mic with her hand. A minute later, “What is it?”
“I have a weird question, but if you had company,” Bobbie said.
“He’s gone. He was pretty enough, but postcoital conversation was not his strong suit. What’s going on?”
“I’m going through the loot we pulled off that freighter,” Bobbie said. “And I found this crate of stuff I’m having a hard time identifying. Thought maybe you could help.”
“You’re at that warehouse by the surface? Let me pull on some clothes and I’ll get right down there.”
“No,” Bobbie said. “Don’t do that. I think this might be dangerous and I don’t want anyone in here until I figure it out. Hold on, let me send you some video.”
Bobbie passed her terminal across the crate, giving Rini a good look at the power cell and the spheres. Then she propped the terminal up against the edge so she could use both hands to pick up a sphere and show the warning text to the camera. When she was done, she said, “Any ideas?”
There was a long pause. Bobbie felt the unease rising in her like an illness.
“Fuck me,” Rini said at last.
“What do you think it is?”
“So the big question about the Magnetar-class ships has always been power,” Rini said. There was a lot of background noise as she spoke, drawers opening and closing. Clothes being pulled on. She was dressing in a hurry. “The stars the ships are named after have incredible magnetic fields, but they’re rapidly rotating neutron stars, so how do you get that beam effect the ships have without, you know, spinning up a neutron star?”
“Okay,” Bobbie said. Her knowledge of astrophysics was pretty thin. “How do they?”
“No one knows!” Rini said. “But it would take way more power than a typical fusion reactor puts out. Everyone just sort of assumed that meant the Laconians had much better reactors than us. But we have the Storm, and our reactor is good, but its design is nothing paradigm shifting.”
“I’m sitting right next to this thing while you talk,” Bobbie said, “so go faster maybe.”
“Antimatter results in a one hundred percent conversion of matter into energy. Nothing else even comes close. If the Laconians power their beam with antimatter, that actually makes sense.”
Bobbie laughed. There was only a little mirth in it. “Am I sitting next to four bottles of antimatter, Rini?”
“Maybe? I mean, the only way to contain it would be a magnetic field. If it touched anything, boom. So, sure? Maybe.”
“How much of that stuff do you think is in here?”
“I don’t know. A kilo? A gram of it would be a bomb big enough to level a city. Based on the size of those orbs, you’ve probably got enough there to punch a hole in this moon. I mean, if that’s what’s in there.”
“All right,” Bobbie said. “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”
“Fuck that, I’m on my way down there,” Rini said, then killed the connection. At least Bobbie understood now why the Tempest was treating this as high priority. Looking at the metal balls in their case was making Bobbie’s scalp crawl.
And then, all at once, it wasn’t.
The fight had just changed. And she knew how to win.
Chapter Thirteen: Naomi
The question is,” Saba said on Naomi’s monitor, “why did they have a political officer in the first place, que no?”
The Bhikaji Cama was on the float, and still half a week from a gentle quarter-g braking burn that would take weeks before they reached the transfer station at Auberon. With the drives on the ship, they could have done a full g the whole way, but efficiency and speed weren’t always the same thing. Carrying the reaction mass to accelerate and brake that hard would have meant giving up more of the cargo space. Maybe someday the Laconian technology would overcome the constraints of inertia—the protomolecule had been doing so since Eros—but for now that mystery was still a mystery, like so many others. Where did the ships that went dutchman end up? What would draw the attention and anger of the thing that had destroyed the protomolecule engineers?
Or, on a smaller level, why had a Laconian political officer been riding on a Transport Union freighter?
News of the failure had been slow coming to her. The first report had been sketchy and brief, and said little more than that the raid had gone pear-shaped. Political officer, the informants on the freighter, and one member of the assault team lost. The next thirty-four hours had been a thin slice of hell as she waited for the full after-action report, certain beyond doubt that Bobbie had been the one who’d died.
Only it hadn’t been her. One of her crew was dead, and her mission objective had slipped through her fingers, but Bobbie and Alex and the Gathering Storm lived to fight another day. The death of the political officer was just one of the stupid, random tragedies that happened anywhere, anytime, but significantly more often during battle. If he’d lived, they’d know much more about what he’d been doing. As it was, they were down to educated guesses.
“We have confirmation that he was on his way to the Transport Union’s transfer station at Earth,” Saba said. “But whether that was a permanent placement or a stop along a longer path …” He shrugged eloquently.
Naomi stretched. She liked the freedom of free fall even though it meant doubling up her exercise routine. Or maybe because it meant that. More hours in the resistance band meant at least doing something physical. Feeling her body. And also there was a sense of being where she belonged. From the recording, she could tell that Saba was someplace with a steady gravity. The last four communications from him had all been the same, so a spin station or a mass large enough to hold him down. No one was on a steady burn for that long.
It wasn’t really a surprise that something was happening on Earth important enough to warrant a dedicated representative at the transfer station. Apart from Sol’s permanent role as humanity’s original home, it was still the largest population center in the gate network. And Earth had the largest population of any planet. Even with settlements like Auberon and Bara Gaon Complex growing, there would never be enough ships or shipping to make a dent in the billions still left on Earth. But what exactly was on Winston Duarte’s mind about Sol system was an important question. And one that they could have answered, if luck had broken their way just a little bit more.