Zephyr, Tau Ceti, 01.07.776 CW

26.8 megaseconds since the catastrophe

Ari ben Yosef Espinoza slumped in a chair in the war room, staring at the holo with a sense of both accomplishment and exhaustion. There were similar postures and attitudes right around the table.

Cadotte was also there, along with the Thessalian Lieutenant Verdo; Donato's chief engineer, Lieutenant Jeanine Casper; and Lieutenant Hanna Burgoyne over from the recently arrived Mifune Gō. Castor had done something rare, and sat in separately from Pollux, leaving the latter to help Alexander figure out what was going on with Fusion Two and otherwise shoulder the burdens of running the ship with Chef.

Even Castor managed to affect a look of weary satisfaction as he said, "I believe we've reached a working model."

The doors opened on this statement, admitting Singer and Commodore Haraldsdottir. "Working model of what?"

Espinoza smiled wearily up at Singer, "The portable hole."

"So...we can duplicate it?"

"Not exactly," her engineer responded, but without any real dimming of his sense of accomplishment. "I'll wait 'til everyone's here to delve, but the upshot is that we've got ourselves a repeatable simulation."

Haraldsdottir said, "That's better than being forced to accept magic."

"Exactly, Commodore" this from Burgoyne. "We might still be at pains to build it, but we now think we at least know how it works."

Verdo grumbled, "Except the power thing. That's still..." He shrugged, either at a loss for words or not willing to curse in front of a commodore, even if she wasn't from his service.

The rest began to arrive in their usual straggling ones and twos. O'Halloran came in looking frazzled. Espinoza saw Singer look inquiringly at the other woman, and heard her say, "I went to bed with an empty inbox; I woke up with twenty new messages. It's nice to be needed, but being the only diplomat on hand in a time of crisis is a bit much!"

Karenski had delegated a lot of the actual correspondence to O'Halloran, for exactly that reason. She had not yet had a chance to recruit a staff of any kind, and it wasn't clear when she would.

Espinoza could sympathize, although his problem was different. He had help, but he'd gotten very little sleep lately. One reason he was feeling so satisfied is that, now that the basic nut was cracked, he thought maybe he could get some rest. For one night, at least.

Everyone found seats. There wasn't even the smallest pretense at formality in this group, any more. Verdo still seemed bothered by that—the Thessalian service was apparently pretty buttoned down. At the moment, though, even he was too tired to do more than wave as his own CO, Josefilo, came in.

Finally, Karenski and Donato arrived. Both of them looked downright grim, which meant bad news. Somewhat selfishly, Espinoza hoped they'd ask about his project before they delivered it.

In fact, Karenski stared at the looping simulation, taking in what he could of the details, before sitting down himself. "Espinoza, tell me this is good news. I need some. Lie if you have to."

"Admiral, it is good news, at least, to a point."

"I'll take it."

Espinoza stood, not so much a nod to absent formality as simply a habit of presentation. "What we've been working on is taking Wang Shu's fourth hypothesis, along with all the data Baldursdottir was able to mine from their sensors—which, tired though I am, let me commend my cousin and her crew for their thoroughness despite their hurry to get out and report.

"What we have will probably not be nearly as impressive or satisfying to most of you as it is to us wonks, who are happy to have made it work at all. Having achieved what we thought was a basic model, we asked Castor to run a variety of simulations, trying to figure out what we could possibly build ourselves with energy sources we actually have on hand, to produce any similar aperture at all, however small, provided it was both measurable and stable. Castor?"

"At this time, Admiral, we believe that it would take roughly twenty fusion plants of the scale usually employed in planetary installations—at the risk of indelicacy, the kind of plants that until recently powered the cities of Cherryh's World. Twenty such plants, delivering power in parallel, would allow us to create a stable tunnel approximately two meters in diameter."

Karenski took this in silently, seriously mulling it, then said, "No offense, but you were right. That's still a lot of power for a very small hole."

"It is," said Espinoza, "but then we found a way to refine it a bit." He touched a control, and a second display, showing the location of the observed portal relative to other bodies in LHS 1140 in a top-down view, appeared. "I had a hunch, you see, that the location of the portal within the system was not a random choice, and I was right. You should be able to see it right away, I think."

He knew it was going to annoy some people in the room, but Karenski, as a long-time teacher, would recognize his technique at once. Sure enough, Haraldsdottir said, "Ari, you could just tell us."

"Allow me some joy, Commodore."

Donato saw it first. "The aperture is directly in opposition to the inner planet. Lagrange point L3 relative to LHS 1140c and the star."

"Exactly so. Now, one the one hand, that might be just to limit how much compensation an object—say a ship—would need to invent to make up for gravitational shear while passing from one frame of reference to another, but it started me thinking—"

"What if it cuts the power requirement," Donato said.

Espinoza pointed at him. "That, there. One of the reasons we need to be out of the astropause of a system for all the conventional FTL systems is not just solar wind, but gravity. So, we tried another simulation, and discovered we can cut the wattage requirement by almost an order of magnitude if both ends of the tunnel are sited at Lagrange points of some kind within their respective systems. Now, this wouldn't be perfect. Depending on orbits around you, there would be times when additional influences would come into play, but if you calculate around that, you improve your power requirements significantly."

"So...only two zottawatts." Singer said with a remarkably straight face. Espinoza worried this might be fast-forwarding the conversation, but looking around, people were keeping up.

"Yes. Which is still a lotta watts. More than we know how to produce even with multiple large capacitors."

Josefilo raised a hand, and Espinoza nodded. "Could it be done with capacitors, then?"

His own engineer, Verdo, responded, "The initial opening, yes. It would still require some steady-stream power source to maintain a tunnel—we're still pretty sure that can be done purely conventionally even for an aperture larger than the one seen at LHS 1140. But the process of setting up the tunnel could be done in a burst, like Jump drive."

"So," Espinoza said, "Definitely not magic. That's the good news. What remains to figure out is how they're actually powering this thing, and where they're operating out of. That, in turn, leads us back around to the question of where the Big Signal originates."

Josefilo interrupted. "That went by me a little fast." Espinoza thought possibly the Thessalian colonel had spent too much time with Zephyr's crew, and wondered what his people would think of some of the phrases he'd picked up.

Still, it was a valid point. Espinoza adopted a bit of a professorial pose. He managed to keep a straight face as what he was describing started to be sketched out on the holodisplay, then remembered Cadotte, right next to him, and their implants.

"We've got a time-compression broadcast that retains coherence over at least four-and-a-half light-gigaseconds. That's roughly the distance from here to HD 113337, and their correspondence acknowledging the Diaspora Treaty included the news that they'd heard the signal. And let me congratulate you, Admiral, on thinking to include questions like that in your packet. It saved a lot of very long round-trip time through the relay networks out that direction.

"Thanks to them, we also have enough data on the decay in signal strength noted from all the observers to estimate that it will finally lose coherence at the six gigasecond mark, far outside our bubble of contact. That's a feat that requires unfathomable amounts of continuous power, even if the broadcast stations are outside the astropause of their host system.

"Ergo, I think the one leads us to the other. The alternative is whoever they are have built two monumental power plants somewhere and that's just too scary to think about right now."

O'Halloran spoke up at that point. "Surely, by now, we have enough data to pinpoint a system."

Cadotte stood to answer this one. "We do, Ambassador, but...the answer we keep getting makes no sense." They touched a control, and the display was replaced by one representing all the sample points the various ships and stations they'd been talking to, including all the cooperating diaspora systems, and the cone they narrowed down to.

"The only system the data points to is Sol, and we're pretty sure someone would have noticed."

Karenski heaved a deep sigh at this point, getting the table's attention as effectively as a gavel. "Until three kiloseconds ago, Lieutenant, I would have agreed with you entirely. Then, we got this relayed to us from David's Star."

This time he touched a control. A very perplexed face filled the screen. "This is Captain Nikola Susic, Neptune Anchorage Tower Actual. We have a Red Three situation at Jove Junction. Repeat: Red Three. Jove Junction has gone entirely silent, except for one ship that has managed to escape upwell with news. Recording attached, but the upshot is that three barges, actual origin unknown but otherwise unremarkable, docked at Ganymede City and disgorged a contingent of soldiers armed with energy weapons. The soldiers proceeded to burn holes in anyone who opposed them, or even looked like they might. It is not currently known what they did with the broader civilian population. The fact that none of the Jovian cities are responding to message traffic implies that they have all fallen to this same invasion. Three barges of similar type are now burning upwell for Neptune, ETA, four weeks, or roughly two-and-a-half megaseconds. While we are forewarned, we currently know of no way to counter the energy weapons used.

"Request advice or assistance of any kind.

"Once again, this is Captain Nikola Susic, Neptune Tower Actual. Red Three, Red Three, Red Three. Clear."

What followed was a recording from a sole refugee aboard a sabotaged shuttle, with a single prisoner in storage in hopes someone could recover the boat. If she burned hard, she would likely outrun the barges, but either way, Espinoza thought, she probably wouldn't live to see it.

Next to him, he felt rather than saw Cadotte get very still. It was not an emotional response, he knew. This was Cadotte thinking very, very hard. Before he could ask them about it, Karenski cleared his throat and said, "Captain Singer?"

"Admiral?" Her voice was remarkably steady, but Espinoza was pretty sure it was taking all her effort to keep it that way.

"I know you've been itching to actually do more than sit here thinking about the problem. Now's your chance. You will take Zephyr as fast as you can to Neptune Anchorage. You work with the Anchorage for its defense, and you are authorized to use whatever force is necessary and possible to prevent their being boarded. Neptune has acknowledged the Diaspora Treaty, so you are authorized to either drop one of our relays to supplement their connection to the DSR network with one directly here, or else repurpose the existing DSR relay to serve both networks if possible. Any questions?"

Espinoza expected her to need a moment to digest those orders, but apparently, Karenski had judged rightly that Singer was eager for something to do. "Only: 'When shall we depart, sir?'"

"As soon as your bunkers are full and any personnel not going with you have transferred to other ships. Commodore, do you have room to put the rest of us up on Mifune Gō until those Kujira get here, or shall we all just go back to our own berths?"

Haraldsdottir said, "All honesty, sir, it would be a little crowded right now, even with Zephyr's people gone. We're expecting people to come in from at least some of the other diaspora systems, and we left G581 with a pretty minimal build-out. We're working on it in situ of course, but there's a lot still not done."

Donato said, "I think, if you all can stand spin-gravity for a while in lieu of TCTO magic, we can accommodate you over on Vincent Capozza."

"We'll do that, then. Singer, please coordinate with Vincent for the transfer of us and our boats. I'm sorry to give you the bum's rush, but I want you at Neptune well ahead of those barges. As it is, Zephyr and Gō are the only two ships among us who would stand a chance not just to get to the system in time but get downwell to the anchorage to do something."

"Understood, sir," and here, Singer got a bit of a feral grin. "It'll be a chance to find out what Zephyr's really got!"

There were answering chuckles all around, despite the tension.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Cadotte interrupted, saying, "Admiral Donato?"

"Lieutenant?" he responded, apparently now used enough to Cadotte's mannerisms not to be surprised.

The request itself, however, gave him pause. "Is it correct to assume Neptune Anchorage would have a complete enough map of Sol's asteroid belt to filter out the occlusion of known objects while looking downwell?"

Finally, he said, "I suspect so. Why?"

"Can you ask them to do so, please, and then to report any unexpected occlusions of downwell bodies, especially Sol itself?"

Espinoza saw Verdo's eyes go wide, and Burgoyne face palm. He was missing something...and then he wasn't, exclaiming, "Dyson?!"

Cadotte looked at him, almost excited at the prospect. "It would explain almost everything, wouldn't it?"

"Except who built them."

Karenski interrupted, "Lieutenant, are you seriously suggesting that someone has finally decided to put Dyson and Stapeldon's ideas to the test?"

"Yes, sir, and the 'real' version, not the one everyone thinks of when they think of a Dyson Sphere, but the thing he actually proposed as practical: a network of stations collecting solar energy and then beaming it where needed. You could collect more than enough wattage with a ring of stations sparse enough not to be noticed. Particularly since, as I understand it, nobody really pays attention to the deep well in Sol."

Donato was swearing under his breath, clearly taking the idea seriously. "Nobody looks downwell in Sol at all except for occasional scientific curiosity. Neptune barely looks down at Jove and they have regular barge traffic. That's undoubtedly how those boarding parties stole a march on the junction in the first place. Build a barge that looks like typical traffic, have it approach from a reasonable seeming vector, and nobody's really going to notice that it didn't originate from where it says."

O'Halloran objected, "All right but...there's nobody downwell of Jove, right? So assuming these guesses are right, who's doing it?"

"I don't know, Ambassador," Donato said, "but all along, they've been hitting us at our blind spots. This fits the pattern. I'll pass the request, Lieutenant. You probably won't get the answer until you get there, though."

"Understood, Admiral. Thank you."

There was a moment where nobody quite knew where to take things next. Finally, Singer said, "Okay, folks, it's been great getting to know everyone, but this party's over if I'm going to get moving as quickly as we need to. Robin, will you handle the traffic control to get our guests over to Vincent?"

"Yes'm," came the answer without hesitation.

Next, Singer looked at Espinoza, eyes intent. "You're asleep on your feet, Engineer, and Cadotte looks about the same. You're both exempted from departure prep—delegate to your juniors or to Chef and get at least two shifts' R&R. No arguments."

Far from arguing, Espinoza sank into his chair and said, "Do I have to go back to my quarters? It's a long way back to my quarters. I could fall asleep right here, right now, to be honest."

"You can sleep in a corridor for all I care, just so long as you sleep."

The rest stood to leave. Haraldsdottir, to Espinoza's surprise, grabbed Singer into a fierce hug rather than a more decorous farewell. The rest filed out with salutes or handshakes, except O'Halloran. At that point, he felt Cadotte nudge him, and say, "Maybe let's actually not sleep in here. I'm actually sick of these chairs."

It occurred to Espinoza then that O'Halloran was probably not coming with them. Karenski was going to want her here to continue to coordinate diplomacy. "Yeah," he said, getting up again. "Good point." They walked out, both saying almost in unison, "Captain, Ambassador," and left the two of them alone to say their farewells.

Nobody would have really been surprised if they'd noticed Espinoza and Cadotte heading for the same cabin—his. They both managed to fumble out of their uniforms enough to fall down on the bed. Before they drifted off, Cadotte mumbled sleepily, "I'm gonna make a bet right now. Remember it, yeah?"

Barely awake, Espinoza replied, "I'll try."

"It's a really crazy bet, though."

"Don't bet real money, then," he said through a yawn. He was fighting to stay awake.

Cadotte, however, was a little more animated. "Oh, no, this one's crazy enough I'd totally bet real money if I could."

"Wayra, I'm too tired for suspense. Spit it out. One syllable or less, please."

"Earth."