Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“You think whatever’s on the other side will hit back?”

“Yes. Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t like things that can only happen once. You can’t make sense of something when there’s no pattern. One data point is the same as none.”

“Would you feel better if the big man committed to doing this again a few dozen times?”

A couple billion kilometers away, the drive lit up for a moment, flickered, and went out.

“I think he did.”

Elvi wasn’t sure what the atmosphere on the science deck really was. She wanted to think that everyone else was just as uncomfortable with Sagale’s plan and, like her, staying as quiet about it. But the trut

h was that Jen and Travon looked excited. Their screens showed the inputs from a dozen probes and arrays scattered through the local void and three countdown timers. The first timer showed the time—down to minutes now—when the first ship would pass through the gate and, hopefully, into oblivion. Trailing that by only a few seconds, the timer for the second ship—the bomb ship—that would follow it. And then with three full minutes more, the detonation clock.

They were too far away to disarm the antimatter bomb. Making sure the experiment failed safe if it failed would be up to Medina Station. If the bomb ship somehow actually made the transit into the gate network, Medina would shut it down without detonation. The Falcon, almost a light-hour away, was watching literal nothingness for signs that the thing beyond the gates—the thing inside them—had even noticed what they’d done.

“You know what would be funny?” Fayez said. “If this whole blowing-things-up plan broke the gate and we were all trapped here on this ship for the rest of our lives with no way home.”

Sagale glowered and cleared his throat.

“You’re right,” Fayez said. “Too soon.”

The first counter fell to zero, turned from blue time-to-transit to red time-since-transit. In an hour they would see it happen, hear the tech ship’s report. In the vast emptiness, all they had was the assumption that the plan had actually gone forward.

“Everyone strap in,” Sagale said. “If the enemy fires another of those void bullets at the system, we may lose consciousness for a time.”

Jen and Travon put on their restraints. Elvi already had hers on. Twice before, she’d lived through the consciousness-breaking backlash of pissing off whatever had murdered the protomolecule. Once on Ilus with an army of alien bug-robots ready to cut her down, once sitting on a couch in a waiting room on Luna watching the newsfeeds as the Tempest prepared to annihilate Pallas Station. She was almost used to it at this point, or that was what she told herself. Still, she wasn’t looking forward to doing it again. The second timer zeroed. The bomb ship was through the gate. Presumably it had gone dutchman too.

The seconds seemed to go slower as the last timer fell. On the screen two ships waited outside the gate, preparing to begin the first transit. It was like looking into the past, waiting for something to happen that had already happened. The light bouncing off those ships and streaking toward her was almost an hour old, from her frame of reference, anyway.

The last timer hit zero. Somewhere farther away than a mere normal light-hour, something very violent happened in whatever non-space the gates passed through. Elvi held her breath.

“Are we seeing anything?” Sagale asked, his voice tight and tense.

“Nothing yet,” Jen said.

Elvi waited for the weird dilation of perception. The sense of being able to see atoms and waves, of experiencing herself and her environment in such detail that the border between them vanished, her body and the universe smearing together like a watercolor painting under a faucet. One breath, then another. It kept not happening.

“All right,” Sagale said. “Protocol says we will hold position and remain in safety restraints until—”

“Holy shit,” Travon said. “Are you guys seeing this?”

On the screens, the space around them boiled. As Elvi watched, confirmation started rolling in from the outlying probes. One after the other, they all reported the same thing. An uptick in quantum particle annihilation. The underlying hum of the vacuum cranking up to a shriek.

“That,” Travon said, his voice low and breathy, “is beautiful. Just look at it.”

“Report,” Sagale said.

“It’s like what we saw in Sol system, sir,” Jen said. “Virtual particle activity has increased massively. I’d have to say they noticed us.”

“Check the time stamp,” Sagale said. “Have we lost consciousness? Did we stay awake the whole time?”

“We did,” Elvi said even before she checked the data. “I mean the second one. We didn’t lose consciousness. We stayed awake.”

“Yeah, our entanglement experiment didn’t break either,” Jen said. “They all failed in Sol system. Ours looks fine. Whatever this is, it’s different.”

Sagale chuckled, and a broad smile grew on his lips. Elvi thought it was the first time she’d seen the man showing anything like real pleasure. “Well now,” he said. “That is interesting.”

“God damn,” Travon said, “look at this. This is incredible.”