st three days to process the enormity of it, and she couldn’t. It was too big.
Three days was long enough for Sagale to report in and for Duarte to deliberate and respond. It probably wasn’t long enough for Sagale to have pushed back and been shut down. He hadn’t even tried. That was the disappointing part.
“We have protocol. It is that when a ship fails to transit, send a bomb ship through the same gate. It’s the only way to keep our message clear.”
“And then see if we can lose another gate or two?”
“The losses that we have suffered are… significant,” Sagale said. “But it is the considered opinion of the high consul that they do not represent an escalation on the part of the enemy.”
“How do you even get there?”
Sagale lifted a hand, palm out, but the softening in his eyes made it a request to hear him out more than an order that she be silent. Elvi crossed her arms and nodded him on.
“The attacks the enemy made on us have been ineffective in that—in that—they did insignificant primary damage. The loss of consciousness that we experienced in Sol system when Pallas died might have been deadly for the protomolecule’s designers, but it was largely ineffective against us. The response in Tecoma system would have been trivial in any other system. The effect was… unfortunate only because of features of the landscape, so to speak, that are not in play elsewhere in the empire.”
“So I just picked a bad Bikini Atoll?” Elvi said.
“No one holds you responsible for what happened, Doctor. You couldn’t have known any more than we could. If anything, the strategic error was mine. I saw the inhospitable nature of the system as an advantage and overlooked the possible consequences.”
He spread his hands.
“Or,” Elvi said, “it was a trap.”
“I don’t see how—”
“No. Be quiet. It’s my turn now. What we saw in Tecoma wasn’t even similar to the previous interactions. We were awake the whole time. It didn’t change our perceptions of anything. That was something different. And if you look at the logic of it? It’s not even hard to see.”
“Walk me through it.”
“That star wasn’t natural, it was created. And it was created from a system that looked like Sol. It was manufactured and it was pointed at the ring gate. They aimed it like tying a shotgun trigger to a doorknob. Our bomb ship did something to activate it. Maybe it got something to come look at us, and that’s what set it off. I don’t know. But it was built to be a booby trap.”
Sagale’s scowl looked like he’d bitten into a bad date. “That is an interesting interpretation,” he said.
“It fired off the largest gun that it’s possible to make given the physical laws of the universe. And what’s more? The station was built to withstand it. It took a gamma burst from a collapsing neutron star, and it’s not dead.”
“You find that significant.”
“I find that pretty clear evidence that we’re way out of our weight class here and we should stop throwing punches!”
“You don’t have to shout, Doctor.”
Elvi unballed her fists and tried to relax her jaw. Her blood felt hot in her face, and she didn’t know if it was from fear or anger or if any normal emotions actually fit into a situation like this. Sagale’s system chimed an alert, and he muted it.
“I don’t disagree with you,” he said. “But what does not throwing punches look like?”
“Not sending bomb ships through would be a start.”
“It would. But so would abandoning the gates entirely. Would you recommend doing that? There are colonies that will collapse if we choose that, and maybe those are acceptable losses. But once the trouble began last time, shutting down the gate network didn’t save the beings that used it. They were dead when we turned the system back on.”
“Not starting trouble was my argument.”
“Trouble started long before Laconia existed. Ships have been disappearing for decades. Whatever this is, it began before we recognized it. The fastest way to undermine a strategic plan is to abandon it before there’s sufficient reason to do so. The high consul has been briefed. He believes that the tit-for-tat plan still has merit.”
“And so you’re going to do it.”
“I do as I’m told, Doctor. I am an officer of the Laconian military,” Sagale said. “As are you.”
The mood on the Falcon showed in small ways. Instead of wandering to and from the commissary while she thought, Jen remained rooted at her station. Travon moved through the ship tapping his thumb and middle finger together in a fluttering beat every time a new status update came from the Typhoon or Medina. Sagale stayed in his office for the most part, avoiding Elvi and Fayez and the rest of the science team as if their disapproval bothered him.