“So, Tecoma system,” she said. “The probes said it was a neutron star?” She tried sitting up. Her head swam a little, so she stopped there.
“It is,” Fayez agreed, putting a hand on her back to help steady her. “But, you know, weirder.”
The dizziness passed, and her eyes were focusing better as well. The text on the screens around her became actual letters and numbers.
“Help me up,” she said, then dropped her feet to the floor. Fayez put an arm around her waist as she tried standing. Her legs were a little weak, but the gravity felt like they were only burning at a quarter g or so, so it was easy to stay upright. Fayez gave her a look, then took his arm away, waiting close by to grab her if she fell. She didn’t.
“I’ll need some clothes,” she said. Fayez nodded and opened a nearby storage locker. “Weirder how?”
“Emptied,” Fayez said, then tossed her uniform and some clean underclothes on the couch. “Massive rapidly spinning neutron star, no planets, planetoids, asteroids, nothing.”
Elvi pulled off the thin smock she wore in the submersion couch and headed to the shower. Fayez followed her in, carrying a towel. The blast of hot water made her dizzy again, but one hand on the wall and some deep-breathing exercises cleared it up in a few seconds. Fayez watched closely, but once he was sure she was all right, he relaxed. As she washed the last of the goop off her body, Elvi said, “They cleared everything out to make a diamond backup drive too.”
“This is more than that. I don’t mean no planetary bodies. I mean no nothing. No micrometeors. No dust. No spare protons floating around. The vacuum here is as hard as it can get.”
“That’s… Okay. Weirder.” Elvi turned the water off, and Fayez tossed her the towel. “I mean, is that even possible?”
“No. Not unless there’s something keeping it clean. We’re still in the Milky Way. There should be some spare crap floating through now and then. So not only is the system cleaned out, something’s actively keeping it cleaned out. And—get this—the gate is five times farther out from the star than any of the other gates. And it’s above the plane of the ecliptic. Ninety degrees. Don’t even get me started on the star.”
“What’s going on with the star?”
“It’s massive. I mean, like, spit-on-it-and-it’ll-start-to-collapse-into-a-black-hole-level massive.”
“Good that there’s no spit around, then.”
“Right? It turns out neutron stars aren’t much to look at. Unless you can see magnetic fields, they’re just… underwhelming. I mean the densest matter possible, forces so powerful as to break space-time? Sure. Bright as hell, you bet. But I was expecting a light show or something. It just looks like another sun, but smaller and kind of angry about it. This one is spinning fast enough to land in the pulsar range. We’re far enough away to avoid the worst of the magnetic disturbance.”
She took a deep breath. She could hear the anxiety in his words. She knew what they meant.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You aren’t. You could have died.”
“I didn’t, though. And now, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
Elvi finished drying off and stuffed the towel into the recycler. Fayez pulled a jar of scalp cream out of a cabinet and began rubbing it into her short, tight curls with his fingertips. It felt wonderful to have him massaging her head. When you find a man who takes pleasure in helping you avoid dry scalp, Elvi thought, you keep him.
“You can do that all day if you want,” she said.
“If we had all day, my attentions would begin moving south,” he replied with a grin. “But we’re killing our burn in about two hours, and I don’t believe that you’re going to wait one more second to start working.”
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.”