“I was,” he admitted. “That’s some shit, huh?”
“Yeah,” she agreed, letting out a heavy breath. It’d managed to dredge up some memories of the war she could have done without at the moment.
“Hydrogen’s just extremely explosive,” Cavalon said. “And that injection valve’s seen better days. Probably one of the least-safe things I’ve ever done. And that’s saying a lot, honestly.”
She turned a glare onto him. “Void, why didn’t you tell us?”
“Why, so we can all be freaked out? Plus, it’s not like we would’ve had time to replace it.”
Adequin shook her head, but decided to let it be. It was over now, and no one had exploded.
She gestured to the pile of empty tanks strewn all over the corridor. “Doesn’t seem like much.” Not that she had the first clue what star-building entailed. But it didn’t seem like someone should be able to make one from four dozen tanks of compressed hydrogen. “Will it be enough?”
Cavalon shrugged. “No idea.” He crossed his arms and stared at the panels for a few seconds. “Can I, uh, be frank with you, Rake?”
Adequin swallowed. This was it. When he tells her this is foolish and it’ll never work, and all she’d done was bring them here to die in the wake of the Divide aboard an overlarge, dead data beacon.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“There’s an apparatus on those schematics. It’s marked as a primary system. We had to feed it some freaking teracene—you know, the metamaterial that runs the gates? I have no idea what the system is. But I’ll tell you what I hope it is.”
“And what’s that?”
“Some kind of … hydrogen duplication machine.”
“That sounds made up.”
“Yeah. It would be. That doesn’t exist. Then again, none of this does.”
“Fair enough.”
“I also hope, there’s some kind of … spacial compression that’s going to happen, even once it’s burning. I just can’t see how the mass is going to be enough to sustain itself in a chamber only ten meters in diameter.”
“This really isn’t bolstering my confidence that this is going to work.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Me either. I mean, we’re putting in the right amount—the amount the atlas schematics call for. So in theory, this should all work, assuming the Viators didn’t give shitty instructions.” He looked to Adequin and grinned. “We’ll find out, I guess.”
“So we’re ready?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, with too much forced cheer.
“How do we start it?”
He pointed to an inconsequential, small rectangular button near the center of the control panel, enclosed in a glass casing. “The schematics say this is the guy. Press button, make star.” He swung his look back toward her. “You wanna do it?”
“Not in the least. This is your baby, you do the honors.”
“I get it,” he grumbled. “You want me to be the one to kill us all.”
She scoffed a laugh, then took in a deep, calming breath. He stared back at her expectantly. She sighed. “You want us to push it together, don’t you?”
“Looks like a tough button,” he said with a grin. “Might take two of us, even with the aid of Imprints.”
She rolled her eyes and switched back to universal comms. “Fine. Everyone ready out there? Mesa?”