The man on her wall screen was David Trujillo, and at four hours into his presentation, three and a half of which had been a careful and painstaking walk through a forest of explanations and justifications for which mathematical techniques his team had used in interpreting the data, he was getting to the phase she thought of as dumbing it down for the biologist.
“The key is the difference between the reactions provoked by the magnetic field generator in Sol system and the lack of provoked response in the ring space itself. We’ve been aware of the energetic amplification effect of ring gate technology. For example, energy sent into the ring station causes a release of high-energy particles through the gates, and the energy of this release is orders of magnitude greater than the initiating event. This asymmetry was exploited in the design of the field generator. The assumption was that this was a borrowing of energy from someplace else within complex local space-time. If, as these results suggest, that’s not accurate, and if the ring gate space is a bounded membrane within an alocal, acontiguous space-time—”
“Is he saying something?” Fayez asked from the other side of the cabin. “Because he sounds like he’s just barking.”
Fayez was exercising, strapped against the wall by resistance bands and pushing against them the way she should have been. When this was over, her bone density was going to be a problem. That was for another day.
“I’m sorry. I’ll listen on private.”
“No, no. This is me starting a conversation. Getting attention from my sweetheart. Mocking the guy she’s paying attention to by saying how he’s barking.”
“He’s barking about something.”
“Are you sure?”
She stopped the report playback and stretched.
“When the Tempest destroyed the defenses on the alien station in the ring space,” Elvi said, “the enemy didn’t respond. When it destroyed Pallas Station, everyone in Sol system lost consciousness, and one of the bullets showed up on the Tempest. Trujillo thinks it shows that the ring space isn’t part of our universe.”
Fayez relaxed, the bands pulling him back against the wall. He pushed out again, grunting. “I didn’t know there was an option.”
“The field generator uses antimatter as a primer, but there’s not enough power in a couple handfuls of antimatter to spaghettify a station. The design was developed based on the half-built ship or whatever it was that was in the construction platforms when they were turned on.”
“The one they called the Proteus?”
“Basically, it makes a tiny, transitory ring gate, which releases just a lot of energy for free. And apparently, it’s violating entropy. Which means time.”
“Entropy only runs one direction. Primary school physics requires three hours of barking?”
“He’s saying wherever it’s getting that energy from doesn’t play by our rules.”
“We knew that, though.”
“We suspected it.”
“Do we know it now?”
“We suspect it harder,” Elvi said. “We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.”
Fayez chuckled, strained, relaxed. He was waiting for her to laugh with him, but she didn’t have it in her. Worry bloomed on his forehead and the angle of his lips. “Are you all right?”
“There were two more.”
He stopped, looked at her, and shrugged off the straps. “Two more what?”
“Events. Galbraith system saw a transitory change in lightspeed.”
“How long did it last?”
“Literally an unanswerable question, but about an hour. Bara Gaon lost consciousness for eighteen minutes. The people who went through it said there was no halo effect, no visual disturbances, just”—she snapped her fingers—“eighteen minutes later.”
“That’s new.”
“It’s all new. It’s all experiments, and none of them are mine.
And those are just the ones we know about. If the poking and prodding wasn’t someplace we know to look for it, it could be happening much more often. It could be happening right here, right now.”
He pushed off through the cabin. She was ready to bristle at his touch, too tense for the extra burden of physical contact. He only braced beside her and looked at Trujillo’s face, paused on the playback.
“How’s Cara?” Fayez asked.
“Fine. She seems fine. I’m a little concerned about these others she’s talking about. I know she and Xan are connected somehow at the back, and there are other things back there. Amos Burton went through the same thing they did, and if she’s connected with him through the same bridge that’s . . . That man’s head isn’t a place I’d want to live. But . . .”