“We’ve never seen anything like this before.” She’d known Cameron Tur professionally since she’d first taken a job with the union, and he’d never registered as more than vaguely interested in anything.
Now he sat across the table from her, gesturing with a tortilla like he was conducting an orchestra with it. His eyes were wide and bright, his voice higher and faster than usual, and she couldn’t make out what the hell he was saying.
“Hot places in space,” she repeated, looking at the schematic. “So, like stealth ships? Are you saying there are stealth ships waiting outside the ring gate?”
“No, no, no,” Tur said. “Not that kind of hot. Not
Drummer gave a short, frustrated laugh and put the hand terminal down. “Okay, maybe we should try this again like you were talking to a civilian. There are these areas we’ve seen that are … what exactly?”
“Well,” Tur said, nodding more to himself than to her. “Of course you know that a vacuum isn’t really empty. There are always electromagnetic waves and particles that pop in and out of existence. Quantum fluctuation.”
“My background is in security and politics,” she said.
“Oh. Right,” Tur said. He seemed to notice his tortilla, took a bite from it. “Well, vacuum state isn’t at all just emptiness. There are always spontaneous quantum creations and annihilations. Hawking-Zel’dovich radiation that allows for—”
“Security, Tur. Politics and security.”
“Sorry. Really small things just show up and then they just go away,” Tur said. “Much smaller than atoms. It happens all the time. It’s perfectly normal.”
“All right,” Drummer said, and took a sip of her morning coffee. Either it was a little more bitter than usual or she was overly sensitive today.
“So when we turned all the sensor arrays on the gate? To try to get more information about the war and all that? There was interference we couldn’t make sense of. It was like the kind we see when signals pass through the gates, but it wasn’t localized there. It was out in normal space.” He pulled the schematic back up. “Here and here and here. That we know of. There may be others, but we haven’t done a full sweep looking for them. But we never saw anything like this, and the logs make it seem like they may have appeared about the same time that the Laconian ship went through the gate. Or when it fired at the ring station. We don’t have great data on timing.”
“All right,” Drummer said again. She was growing impatient.
“It’s the rate, you see. The rates of quantum creation and annihilation are … they’re through the roof. The uptick is
She was still struggling to get her mind around the idea that emptiness wasn’t empty, but something about the awe in Tur’s voice sent a chill down her back all the same.
“So you’re telling me … what exactly?”
“That the space near the ring started
Santiago Singh spent a very unpleasant few days dealing with the fallout from his newly announced security protocols for Medina Station. One by one, every bureaucrat and functionary called him to express their concerns over how the crackdown might negatively impact morale and efficiency on the station. However the conversations were phrased, what he heard in them was always the same.
His responses, however he put them, were also of a piece:
In High Consul Duarte’s seminal book on logistics, he’d pointed out that of all the methods by which one can exert political and economic control over another state, occupation by military force was the least effective and the most unstable. The justification for occupation of Medina Station was that, as the checkpoint of all thirteen hundred colony worlds, it minimized the need for any further military action and let the imperial government move on quickly to economic trade and cultural pressure, which were much more stable long-term strategies for exerting control. And in fact, demonstrating to the people of Medina that the Laconian takeover would lead to better lives for all of them was the test case. If Singh could convince a station full of people bred for anarchy that imperial rule was desirable, the still-nascent colonies beyond the gates should be a piece of cake.
