Zephyr, Tau Ceti, 16.27.775 CW

23.7 megaseconds since the catastrophe

One by one, the conferees returned, and one by one they stopped dead in their tracks and watched impossibility unfold in front of them. None were quite as piquant in their epithets as Espinoza had been.

Karenski arrived not far behind Espinoza and Cadotte, to find those two and Singer were all still rooted to the spots where they had stopped. This left them blocking the door. Cranky, he'd said, "What is this, a sporting event? A concert?"

That broke their reverie and sent Espinoza and Cadotte moving briskly for seats to work at. Singer stood her ground—it was her ship, after all—but Karenski had enough room to get past the door and see what the fuss had been about. He squinted at it in disbelief before blurting, "Great Caesar's ghost!"

Espinoza and Cadotte radiated intense concentration. Espinoza had actually found a stylus—or maybe had one quickly replicated, Singer hadn't paid attention—and was scribbling equations on the table, which was, after all, also a data surface.

Cadotte was peering intently at the holo that those equations were informing. Every now and then, Espinoza would look at them and some quiet word would pass between them, by which Singer realized Cadotte was a more active participant than it appeared, relying on their implants rather than the old fashioned scratch of stylus on screen.

Both the equations on the table and the visualization modeled in front of her engineer and science officer were beyond Singer's understanding of hyperphysics. Instead, she spent her time studying the people and deciding what was going to be necessary to make their subsequent discussions productive.

Admiral Donato had not really recovered from the state he'd been in when she came in. He continued to stare at the loop from Baldursdottir with a peculiar mixture of exhaustion and fascination. He showed no signs of noticing other people in the room, and by unspoken agreement, nobody had disturbed him.

Singer finally broke her gaze away from the display to look at Karenski, who looked back at her a little wild-eyed. Singer spoke first. "Someone raised the stakes."

Karenski's face took on a wry cast as he shook his head. "Someone changed the game."

Saito walked in at that moment, saying, "Game? Who's for tennis?" Then he clued in on the tension in the room and asked, "What'd I miss?"

Singer jutted her chin in the direction of the loop playback.

Saito did not swear. Instead, after watching two loops, during which O'Halloran and Josefilo had also come in, he said, "The amount of power required..."

Espinoza just said, "Yeah, we're working on that," without looking up.

Saito just nodded at that, and moved to take a seat. Josefilo muttered something in Esperanto that Singer did not quite catch, then drifted over to look over Espinoza's shoulder. Whether he actually understood the equations or not, he appeared genuinely engaged. If Espinoza found his presence intrusive, he didn't show it.

It took Singer a moment to realize that Josefilo also was dressed only in his service's standard uniform. No encounter suit. He and Saito had kept their appointment, apparently.

The look O'Halloran exchanged with Singer told her one thing she absolutely needed to know: she, Singer, could not be afraid at this moment. She was host, she had somehow wound up as de facto chair of these meetings, and she was the CO. She could fall apart later.

Karenski clearly felt similarly, but Karenski had been deferring to her. She was the one who was going to have to corral their shock into something more productive.

Last to arrive was Alexander, who took in the situation with zir usual quiet efficiency. Singer could feel zir shock, but also felt and saw them make the same calculation Singer just had. Any meltdowns would have to wait.

Alexander broke the silence by saying, "Castor, Pollux?"

"Commander?" came the stereo reply.

"Can you direct your attention to the table here?"

Espinoza looked chagrined and said, "I should have thought of that. Thank you, Commander." He did not stop his work however.

"Of course, Commander," came the response from one side, and from the other, "Please give us a moment to assimilate the data."

Josefilo shook himself and said, "That's uncanny. Do they do that all the time?"

Alexander answered, "Pretty often, yes. They figured out pretty early how to use stereo effects to distinguish themselves, particularly when not on screen. Castor's voice is also just a little higher pitch, but it's easy to miss."

The Thessalian nodded, pursing his lips thoughtfully. Singer felt Alexander do a double-take at his unhelmeted face. Apparently, he saw it, too, because he put a finger to his lips.

A moment later, Castor—Singer thought it was Castor—said, "Señor Espinoza, I believe you're on the right track, but," and then Pollux, "perhaps Wang Shu's fourth hypothesis—"

Espinoza looked up as if poked with a sharp stick, blinked, looked at Cadotte, and unison they said, "Of course!"

Donato, at last, seemed to be waking up, and said, "You mean you think you know how the trick is done?"

Pollux answered first. "I think it would be more accurate to say we know one way the trick could be done. The mathematics that suggest the possibility are ancient, dating back to the Skip Drive."

Castor continued, "The problem nobody has ever been able to solve is how to bring enough power to bear. Indeed, where the hypothesis leaves off is exactly at that point. At the time Wang Shu was writing, she could not imagine any practical means to generate enough energy to even begin finding the actual threshold."

Almost as if they were a triplet, Cadotte picked up the narrative without changing their unfocused expression. "Various experiments have been attempted using conventional fusion engines at scale, without successfully generating even a microscopic, short-range portal. Most people have assumed that Wang Shu was either just plain wrong, or that it was so impractical to apply the fourth hypothesis that we would never know."

Donato showed he was actually following. "Which explains why it's called a hypothesis, and not a theorem. It's never really been tested successfully, but it's never been disproven either."

Singer took this conversation as an opportunity to finally move toward her seat. She also felt the tension in the room relax a bit. The idea that this "portable hole" was not magic, after all, but could be explained or at least approximated by known math, went a long way toward grounding everybody, emotionally.

Of course, it was still a very big problem. This ability meant their adversary could simply pop in wherever they liked, with whatever other capabilities they had in their bag of tricks. Singer felt her brain wanting to race ahead to start solving tactical problems in a way she hadn't since the Academy. Most cadets went through those courses more for the intellectual exercise of it than anything else. Nearly every tactical exercise was purely fictional. Nobody she was aware of had fired a single shot at anybody else in anger since before Cherryh's World was founded.

Karenski, she thought, was thinking similarly. He had also replicated a stylus and was also scribbling, but Singer knew he was no hyperphysicist.

Espinoza finally set down his stylus with a dramatic click and said, "Somewhere between eight hundred zettawatts and two yottawatts." He heaved a sigh and said with an unexpected grin, "Which is a lotta watts."

Cadotte refocused on the room and turned to glare at him for that as the rest of the room groaned.

Pollux said, "I lean closer to the low-yottawatt range. Maybe not for what Baldursdottir witnessed, which is small, but for any portal large enough to admit a starship."

Castor continued, "Like many other manipulations of hyperspace, the amount of energy required would be much greater at initiation than at any other time. Maintaining a portal could be done with conventional energy sources, albeit high-capacity ones. Closing a portal would, we think, only require withdrawing power."

O'Halloran said, somewhat incredulously, "So, what, space would just...close in behind it?"

It was Espinoza who responded, sounding exhausted. "It's not that different from the old Skip or Jump drives in that regard. Normal space and hyperspace don't really like to interact. They each repel the others' matter and even energy. Each advancement in hyperspace travel has been about finding ways to keep N-space things immersed in hyperspace long enough to be practical for travel or communication, and using practical power sources. We used to use capacitors, charge them up, and dump all that power into an episode, then recharge and repeat. When the envelope expired, the ship emerged back in N-space. Despite numerous popular fictions about it, it was never actually possible to get 'lost' or 'stuck' in hyperspace."

"I still find it hard to believe it wouldn't leave...I dunno, a scar? Something."

"Baldursdottir's record actually does go on a little beyond what I've been looping," Donato answered. "It shows some ongoing elevation of exotic particles, with a declining trend as they decay or possibly get 'rejected' by our space and return to hyperspace. Hannah didn't stay to wait it out, though, and I can't really blame her. LHS 1140 is not that far away as the crow flies, but there's not a lot of other settlement out that way, so the relays stop far enough away that they had to backtrack to get us the news quickly. And this wasn't the only news they delivered."

Donato now had everyone's attention, and he knew it. Singer gestured at him to continue. He did so. "LHS 1140 b is also known as New Victoria. It's a direct seeding from David's Star, with a deliberately low-technology culture that takes full advantage of having a habitable planet. It's why we don't have a relay there. We do have an ambassador, who mostly lives according to local custom and communicates with us through a mail-drop rather than a relay. Long story short: Baldursdottir went there in part to pick up the mail, and in part because it was a part of the arc of triangulating the Big Signal we didn't have data for, yet."

Mention of the Big Signal caused Cadotte to sit bolt upright and then slap their forehead. "Gah! We've been saying all this time that the Big Signal would require a huge amount of energy—not a yottawatt, but still..."

Karenski said, "So, we have corroboration. The big story here is that someone's figured out a power source we haven't previously considered. Now we know at least two ways they're putting it to use."

Donato took the ball back, "Yes, and I agree we need to get back to that, but here's the rest of the news: there's been a revolution on New Victoria. It happened incredibly swiftly. Far more swiftly than we would expect for an otherwise stable culture if both sides had rough technological parity."

Singer got it at once. "It seems like quite a coincidence that a portable hole experiment would happen in that system at around the same time that's going on."

"Exactly. Obviously, we figure that whoever it is used more conventional means to assist the rebels, if that's what happened. And we have no concrete evidence that the revolution and the portal are linked in any way. But..."

There was quiet, and then Josefilo, still standing behind Espinoza and Cadotte, said, "Is it weird to say I'd rather live in a universe where everything we're experiencing is not a coincidence? Conspiracies are annoying but at least they're explicable."

There were chuckles around the room. Cadotte had turned to face him while he spoke, and then said, "Wait a minute. You have a face."

Josefilo calmly responded, "Indeed, my wife insists it's quite a handsome one."

"Yes, but—"

"Wayra," Singer said, "we'll explain later. I have a feeling the Admiral is not quite done."

Donato quirked an eyebrow, but simply said, "Very perceptive, Commander. I'm afraid I am not. Before I left David's Star, Admiral Erasmus and I discussed various possibilities. We both agreed that, if any additional event occurred that could be classified separately under the Contingency Files, it would trigger one possibility in particular. This portal situation qualifies as either Gold Four or a Green Four, depending on whether the people behind it are aliens or humans, respectively. Given how little evidence we've ever found for aliens, my money is solidly on Green Four. Either way, the trigger condition has been reached."

Donato tapped the table in front of him, and at last, the portal-video-loop faded. In its place, in front of everyone's seat, was a flat display of a short document.

Karenski recognized it first and actually laughed. "The Diaspora Treaty?! Really? Jonathan, you and I and a few other historians may be the only ones who even remember this thing exists."

Josefilo raised his hand and said, "Alas, Admiral, not the only ones. The Most High also remembers. It was an eye to the likelihood of it being invoked that I was sent. We remember, and it still binds us, although of course, we hoped it would never be needed."

Singer skimmed it and saw immediately why. The original dating was ancient, but the roll of signatories included almost every colony Newer York had ever seeded, including, of course, Cherryh's World.

Espinoza said, "I believe I'm having a moment similar to what most of you would have if I showed you the equations I was working on before. Someone translate this for me?"

Karenski, looking and sounding sour, said, "The long and short of it is that, in the event of a truly existential crisis that affects multiple signatories, all of the signatories will pool their resources to meet the threat. Of course, we've been doing that anyway, but the part that gets really interesting is that it recognizes the need for organization. The senior admiral or equivalently ranked individual among the polities will take command of the combined resources. It's never been particularly clear how it would be enforced or funded or anything else, but nobody ever really thought it would be invoked."

"But Admiral Donato is invoking it," said Singer.

"Okay, boss," Karenski said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, "So what now?"

Donato blinked. "I think you misunderstand, old friend. Didn't I make it clear that I retired as Admiral of the Outbound before coming here?"

Karenski blinked. Donato continued, looking at Karenski directly. "We invoke the treaty. The senior admiral among the affected powers takes command. That's no longer me, and it's definitely not Erasmus, who of course has just taken office. Based on the records we have as of when I left home, one person stands out has having held flag rank significantly longer than almost anyone else. In fact, if circumstances had not fallen out as they have, only the fact that flag officer has been out of the chain of command acting as a professor would have disqualified him. But that officer has in fact returned to active service."

Karenski, if anything, looked even more sour as Donato said, "I'm not Commander in Chief under the Diaspora Treaty, Vadim. You are."

Apologies to the esteemed Diane Duane for stealing her joke. This is a genre-aware universe, and apparently Espinoza's a fan.