All in all, a really shitty experience.
So when Elvi’s team took the catalyst out of isolation in unexplored systems to do a similar if slightly better-controlled reaching out to the artifacts and remains, she made sure they were careful. They watched what happened, they were ready to put the catalyst back in its box, and they didn’t get too close to anything.
“Falcon in position,” the pilot said.
If anything went terribly wrong, the pilot or Sagale or Elvi could give a single spoken order—Emergency evacuation, their name, and the delta-eight authorization code—and the ship would take it from there. Given the Falcon’s oversized engine and massive acceleration, anyone not in one of the ship’s specially designed high-g couches would be injured or killed, but the data they’d already collected would be preserved. Laconia had a lot of fail-safe logic like that. It wasn’t her favorite part of the job.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Admiral Sagale replied. He was strapped into a crash couch on the bridge too. Another sign of how seriously everyone took this part of the mission. “Major Okoye, you may proceed.”
“Take her out,” Elvi said into the comm. In this situation, there was only one her.
Elvi sat in her custom Laconian crash couch, surrounded by screens. The instruments could be yanked away in under a second, and the couch chamber filled with a breathable fluid for high-g burn shortly after. She was one of the few people important enough that efforts would be made to keep her alive. It felt like working inside a torpedo. She kind of hated it.
On one of her screens, a camera tracked the movement of the catalyst as she was wheeled out of her storage room on a high-tech gurney covered in sensors. Protomolecule communication went both ways. What happened to their sample was just as important to their study as what happened to the dead system that they might be about to activate.
The catalyst’s gurney moved on magnetic wheels down the corridor to a compartment in the skin of the ship, away from all the radiation shielding and whatever high-tech wizardry Cortázar’s team had come up with to lock their sample away from the rest back beyond the gate.
Nothing happened.
“No response yet,” Travon said.
“Gee, really?” Fayez replied, the sarcasm in his tone meant for everyone else. Travon wouldn’t hear it.
While the protomolecule might communicate in ways that looked like they were faster than light once it got going, it didn’t start it right away. Since locality wasn’t a big deal for the protomolecule, but the speed of light was, Elvi suspected it was some slower-than-light handshake as the two network nodes agreed on the protocol to be used. That was somewhere between a guess and a metaphor, but it helped her to think about it.
Her sample came out of Cortázar’s laboratory pens. It hadn’t existed until the recent past. Everything they were trying to interact with here had been waiting since humanity had been a kinky idea that two amoebas came up with. So somehow, when her node came into physical proximity—meaning somewhere in the same solar system—for the first time, they were creating some kind of relationship to each other on the fly. Which was awesome, but also weird. And not how quantum entanglement worked, unless somehow it was.
In her study of the protomolecule and the civilization that had created it, Elvi often found herself glad she wasn’t a physicist. What the protomolecule did biologically, while not entirely explicable yet, at least seemed like it might be fully understood some day. The mechanisms by which it hijacked life and repurposed it were incredibly advanced, but not totally dissimilar to things like viruses and parasitic fungi. She didn’t understand all the rules yet, but she felt like she could, given enough time and research.
What the protomolecule did to physics looked less like a variation and refinement of the standard models and more like kicking the game table over and scattering the pieces across the floor. Elvi wondered if Jen Lively’s constant lighthearted joking was so she didn’t go insane as her understanding of reality was ripped to shreds in front of her on a daily basis.
“Getting a reaction,” Travon said.
“Yeah,” Jen agreed. “Something’s happening in the object.”
“What was the delay on that?” Elvi asked.
“Eighteen minutes.”
They were nine light-minutes from the structure, so that made a handshake propagating at or near c plausible. She really needed to write that hypothesis up and run it past the nanoinformatics staff.
Elvi’s screens went wild with readings from the catalyst’s sensor package. It was too much data to be analyzed in real time, so Elvi let it wash over her like a wave of numbers and graphs. There would be plenty of opportunity later to figure out what it all meant.
“Looking stable so far,” Travon said.
“Always glad when things don’t immediately blow up,” Elvi said, but no one laughed.
“You know what makes a diamond green?” Jen asked everyone and no one. “I looked it up.”
“Radiation,” Fayez said. Of course he knew. He’d been on the Ilus team too, as its geologist. While the opening of the protomolecule gate network had given Elvi more than thirteen hundred new biospheres to study, it had given Fayez ten times that many new geologies to explore. Some of them as exotic as a great huge lump of carbon crystal that was a really pretty color. “Diamonds that form in the presence of radiation can get that green color. Some people mistake them for emeralds. But totally different mineral. Emeralds are beryl, not carbon.”
“Stealing my thunder there, sport,” Jen said. “But I’m betting it means that this star was a lot more active when the object was formed. My best guess, based on stellar decay, is that the object is almost five billion years old. That’s been hanging out for about a third of the time the universe has, you know, existed.”
“That would make it one of the oldest artifacts we’ve found,” Travon said, suddenly interested. “Maybe something from the very beginning of their civilization.”
“Fascinating,” Sagale said, his clipped tones the only sign of his impatience. “What’s it doing?”
What’s it doing that helps us fight ghoulies from beyond time and space? was the implied question. For all her bottomless budget, for all the cream-of-the-crop science teams she’d been given and her custom-built state-of-the-art ship, there was only one result the high consul and his Science Directorate cared about. How do we stop the things that eat ships passing through the gates?
“I don’t know,” she said. “Let me take a look.”
Eighteen hours into their data collection, Elvi retired to her cabin. She’d learned early on that the military discipline of the Laconians didn’t extend to forcing people to work on no rest. Duarte wanted everyone at peak efficiency. Baked into that was the idea that most people would spend a third of their day sleeping. When Elvi climbed out of her couch and said she needed to rest before she began her analysis, Sagale didn’t bat an eye.
It was a trick she’d started using to buy uninterrupted work time. She’d been able to go twenty-four hours straight since grad school. Some caffeine tablets and hot tea, and she could go forty-eight if she needed to. Not sleeping bought her eight or nine hours without Sagale’s questions about results and timetables.