She trailed off, so Elvi finished for her. “It’s a diamond.”
When she was seven years old, Elvi Okoye had returned to Nigeria with her mother when her great-aunt, a woman Elvi had never met, died. As her mother worked to take care of funeral arrangements, Elvi wandered through her house. It became a game of sorts, seeing how much of a picture of the dead woman she could create by looking at the objects she’d left behind. On a shelf next to the bed, a picture of a smiling young man with dark skin and pale eyes who could have been a husband, or a brother, or a son. In the tiny bathroom, among the scattered packages of cheap soaps and cleansers, one beautiful crystal bottle filled with mysterious green liquid. Perfume? Poison? Without having known the woman herself, all the objects she’d left behind were fantastic and compelling.
Many years later, while rinsing her mouth, the smell triggered a memory and she realized the green liquid in the bottle had almost certainly been mouthwash. One mystery solved, but new questions arose. Why had she put mouthwash in such a beautiful bottle instead of just leaving it in the recyclable container it came in? Where had the bottle come from originally? Had she used it as mouthwash, or was there some hidden function mouthwash could perform that Elvi had never thought of? Without the dead woman to explain, it would forever remain a mystery. Some things could only ever be understood in context.
On the view screen, a single faintly green diamond with a machine-perfect smooth surface floating in a solar system with no other planets, orbiting one fading white dwarf star. A bottle of mouthwash in cut crystal, surrounded by cheap soap on a dirty bathroom counter. Fayez was right. The only question that mattered was why, but everyone who knew was dead. The only answer she had left was Professor Ehrlich’s.
The Falcon had been specially designed at the request of High Consul Duarte specifically for her, and it had only one mission: to visit the gate network’s “dead systems” and see if they held any clues about the nameless enemy that had destroyed the protomolecule builders’ civilization or the weird nonphysi
cal bullets that they—or it, or whatever pronoun you used for an extradimensional alocal antecedent—had left behind.
The Falcon had visited three of those systems so far. Every time it had been a wonder. Elvi didn’t like the phrase dead system. People had started calling them that because they contained no planets capable of sustaining life. She found the classification annoying and simplistic. Yes, it wasn’t possible for any life they understood to live on a Jupiter-sized diamond floating around a white dwarf. But there was also no conceivable natural process that could account for such an artifact. Someone had made it. Engineering on a scale that was awesome in the classical sense of the word. Inspiring both wonder and dread in equal proportion. To write it off as dead because plants didn’t grow on it felt like the dread winning out over the wonder.
“They swept up everything,” Fayez said. He was flipping through telescope and radar images of the solar system. “There isn’t even a cometary belt clear out to a light-year from the star. They grabbed every bit of material in this entire solar system, turned it into carbon, and mashed it into a fucking diamond.”
“People used to give diamonds as gifts before proposing marriage,” Jen said. “Maybe someone wanted to be sure the answer wasn’t no.”
Travon’s head snapped up from his console, and he blinked at Jen for several seconds. His rigid literalism meant he was also chemically free of anything resembling a sense of humor, and Elvi had watched Jen’s flippant irony put him into vapor lock more than once.
“I don’t think—” Travon started, but Elvi cut him off.
“Stay focused on the job, people. We need to know everything about this system before we bring the catalyst online and start breaking things.”
“Copy that, boss,” Fayez said, and gave her a wink no one else could see.
The rest of her team, the very best scientists and technicians from across the empire, handpicked and placed under her command by the high consul himself, turned back to their displays. In scientific matters related to their current mission, her orders had the full force of imperial law. No one on the team ever argued.
The caveat being, of course, that not everyone was on her team, and not everything was considered a scientific matter.
“You want to tell him that we’re pushing the rollout,” Fayez said, “or should I?”
She looked at the screen again with a kind of longing. There were probably structures in the diamond. Traces like pale ink in a dead script that could point them a little further toward the next mystery, the next revelation, the next unutterable strangeness. She didn’t want to tell anyone about anything. She wanted to look.
“I’ll take care of it,” Elvi said, and headed for the lift.
Admiral Mehmet Sagale was a mountain of a man with coal-black eyes in a dinner plate–flat face. As the military commander of their mission, he mostly left the scientists alone. But when something fell into an area where his orders specified he was in charge, he was as implacable and immovable as his size suggested. And something about sitting in his spartan office always felt disciplinary. Like being sent to the headmaster for cheating on a test. Elvi hated playing the role of supplicant to a military figurehead. But in the Laconian Empire, the military always sat at the top of the authority chart.
“Dr. Okoye,” Admiral Sagale said. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with the tips of sausage-sized fingers and gazed at her with the same mix of affection and patronizing annoyance she had once given her children when they were doing something stupid. “We are woefully behind schedule, as you know. My orders are to—”
“This system is incredible, Met,” she said. Using the nickname was a little aggression, but one he tolerated. “It’s too incredible to just throw away out of impatience. We need to spend time really studying this artifact before you trot out the catalyst and wait to see if something blows up!”
“Major Okoye,” Sagale replied, using her military title to not so subtly remind her of their relative positions in the chain of command. “As soon as your team finishes their preliminary data collection, we will bring out the catalyst and see if this system has any military value, as per our orders.”
“Admiral,” Elvi said, knowing aggression would fail on him when he was in this mood and trying for a placating respect instead. “I just want a little more time. We can make up the schedule on our trip out. Duarte gave me the fastest science ship in human history so I could spend more time on the science and less on the travel. Exactly like I’m asking you to do now.”
Reminding Sagale that she had a direct line to the high consul, and that he valued her work enough to build her a ship for it. How was that for not so subtle.
Sagale was unmoved.
“You have twenty hours to finish gathering your data,” he said, folding his hands across his wide belly like a Buddha. “And not one minute more. Inform your team.”
“This sort of rigid thinking is precisely why it’s impossible to do good science under Laconian rule,” Elvi said. “I should be running a university biology department somewhere. I’m too old to be good at taking orders.”
“I agree,” Fayez said. “But here we are.”
She and Fayez were in her quarters to shower and catch a quick bite of food before Sagale and his storm troopers trotted out their live sample of protomolecule and risked destroying a billions-of-years-old artifact just to see if it went boom in a useful manner. “If it won’t build them a better bomb, who cares if they break it!”
She whirled toward Fayez as she said it, and he took a half step away from her. She realized she was still holding her dinner plate in one hand. “I’m not going to throw it,” she said. “I don’t throw things.”