“Very well. Bring them directly in,” Singh said, then killed the connection.
It seemed too early for the Tempest to be reporting the Sol system’s surrender, but he was open for a pleasant surprise. According to his tactical map, they would barely be crossing the asteroid belt now. Their projections placed the earliest expected surrender point at the Mars crossing.
Singh needed a distraction to pull himself out of his self-pitying and introspection. Whatever Admiral Trejo needed to tell him so urgently, it was bound to be interesting.
The petty officer who was ushered into his office half an hour later was a tall woman with pale hair that had been turned dark by sweat. She was breathing heavily, and her uniform was damp.
“Sir,” she said, then held out a small black wafer to him.
“You look terrible, sailor,” Singh replied, taking the chip. “Are you all right?”
“The Marines are using all the carts for patrol duty, so …”
“Did you actually run this over all the way from the Storm?” Because of the attack, traveling from the ship to his office meant donning a vacuum suit, moving through the damaged sections of the station, then removing the suit and running down the long spiraling ramp that went from the center of rotation down to the drum floor. And after that a kilometer-and-a-half run across the drum to reach his office complex.
“Yes, sir,” the petty officer said, starting to get her breathing under control.
“I’ll be sending my compliments to your senior chief. Outstanding effort, sailor. Take a moment to clean up, and we’ll round up a cart to drive you back.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, then gave him a sharp salute and left.
Part of the self-pity trap that Singh had realized it would be easy to fall into was the terrible sense of being utterly alone in his job. He needed more interactions with his fellow Laconians. With his ship, and the sailors under his command. He needed these reminders that he wasn’t working alone. That hundreds of like-minded and dedicated professionals shared the dream of the empire. Singh made a mental note to spend more time on the Storm.
He rolled his monitor out onto the desktop and dropped the small black chip on it. “Transfer all files and wipe,” he said, then when the monitor blinked its acknowledgment, snapped the little black chip in two and dropped it in the recycler.
Admiral Trejo’s face appeared on his monitor. Singh found he was a little excited. Trejo was a man with even greater responsibility than his own, and one who handled it with dedication and grace. He was a man who always knew the right thing to do, and did it without hesitation. If Singh wanted to spend more time with the Laconian sailors like himself, he wanted to be Admiral Trejo. He told the monitor to play the message.
Trejo’s face blurred into motion, and his expression became one of puzzlement, and maybe even fear. “Sonny. Something’s happened, and we have no idea what it is or what to do about it. We need some help.”
He paused, and something like dread took root in his expression. “It seems we’ve taken on a passenger of sorts.”
Singh watched the message play out in fascination and then horror and then fascination again.
The object—there really wasn’t any other word to describe it—was a floating sphere of light and darkness hovering about three feet off the deck in a corridor on the Heart of the Tempest. Just looking at a recording of it on the monitor’s small screen made his head hurt. Someone passed a length of pipe through it and back again on the recording. The pipe did not seem to interact with the object at all. And in fact Singh had the sense that he saw both the pipe and the object at the same time with equal clarity even when that should be impossible. It made his head hurt even worse.
Mercifully, the person with the pipe stopped doing it, and Trejo began speakin
g.
“As you can see, the anomaly doesn’t seem to exist as a physical object. It doesn’t appear to radiate on any wavelength, except for visible-spectrum photons. Not one sensing device we’ve aimed at it can even tell that it’s there, but we can record it and see it just fine. Being in the same room with it, looking at it, it’s quite disorienting and causes double vision and severe headaches.”
As if in response to this, four sailors set up a curtain around it using poles and blankets. While they worked, Trejo continued. “It’s moving with us. With the ship, because we’re still under thrust and it hasn’t moved a millimeter since it first appeared. I’ve tried making some minor course adjustments, but it keeps us as its frame of reference. I’ve included all the data we’ve collected on this file, but I can tell you that its first appearance almost exactly matches the moment when we destroyed Pallas Station. It also includes a nearly three-minute blackout shared by every single person on this ship.”
The sailors had finished setting up their curtain, and left. Trejo pulled his monitor close, so his face filled the screen. He lowered his voice, as though telling Singh a secret.
“If this is some new weapon of the inner planets, we need to understand it and now. Blacking out a crew for three minutes, the right three minutes, would create a serious tactical advantage for them. I need you to pass along this information to Laconia through our most secure channels. Get me answers fast, Sonny. I’m about to engage with the combined might of the inner planets’ navies, and this is the first thing that’s made me wonder if I can win.”
Singh sank back in his chair, and rubbed his face with both hands. What if everything, including the attacks on Medina, had just been a distraction? What if the inner planets needed time to bring some new superweapon to bear, and feints and jabs from the Sol fleet and his own insurgents were just to create confusion and buy time?
“Major Overstreet?” Singh said to his monitor.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll need a cart with an armed guard. I’m going to the Storm.”
“Copy that, sir,”
Singh took another data chip out of his desk, laid it on the monitor, and copied all the files Trejo had sent. He then told his monitor to wipe everything. He placed the chip into a lockable metal briefcase, and waited for his ride to arrive.