Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“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.”

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.”