Security personnel were already moving through the crowd toward them, but Teresa waved them off. She felt trapped between wanting to comfort Elsa or get her handheld back or leave in humiliation and shame. Elsa’s mouth was square and gaping as her sobs turned into screams again. Someone nearby shouted, Monster! and Teresa thought for a second they meant her. Then the woman was there. Older, with eyes the same shape as Elsa’s, the same skin tone. Elsa’s mother scooped the girl up in her arms, rocking her.
“It’s okay, Monster,” the mother said, and hushed her gently. “It’s all right. Mama’s here. I’m right here. It’s okay.”
Elsa clamped her hands over her ears, closed her eyes, and buried her head in her mother’s embrace. The mother rocked her, gently making cooing sounds to soothe her. Teresa took a step forward.
“I’m so sorry,” the mother said. “Elsa gets overstimulated. It won’t happen again.”
“No,” Teresa said. “It was my fault. She’s fine. It was me. I didn’t explain the game well enough.”
The mother smiled and turned her attention back to Elsa. Teresa waited for the mother to start asking questions of the little girl. What just happened? and What mistake did you make? and What would you do differently next time? All the things her father would have asked her to make the moment meaningful. But Elsa?
??s mother did none of that. She only calmed her daughter and told her that everything would be all right. That she was loved. Teresa watched with a sensation she couldn’t quite recognize.
She didn’t notice Colonel Ilich coming up to her until he touched her shoulder.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Your father is asking to see you. Now, if you can.”
“Of course,” she said, and followed, only pausing to retrieve her handheld.
Her father’s private office was small. A small desk with a monitor built into the surface that could display flat on the surface or volumetrically over it. As she came in, it was showing a schematic of the slow zone—the gates, the alien station at their center, Medina Station, and a few dozen ships scattered through 750 trillion cubic kilometers. A space smaller than the interior of a star. Her father was still as stone, looking at it. It was like he didn’t need to breathe anymore. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
“What do you remember about the experiment in Tecoma system?”
Teresa sat on the little couch, folding her legs up under her. She tried to recall everything she could of the science briefings she’d been in, but all she could think of was the crying little girl and her mother.
“It’s where we were doing the first tit-for-tat experiment,” she finally said. “To see if the enemy can be negotiated with.” It seemed ominous that she’d just been reviewing the prisoner’s dilemma, and that it had gone badly.
“To see if we can make it change its behavior, yes,” her father said, then gave a small, rueful chuckle. “There’s good news and bad there.” He gestured at his monitor, throwing a report to her handheld. “Look this over. Tell me what you make of it.”
Teresa opened the report like it was a test from Colonel Ilich. Her father watched her while she read through it, looked at the datasets, tried to make it all make sense. She tried not to read Admiral Sagale’s summary at the end, because that felt like cheating. She should be able to draw the conclusions herself.
Then she reached a part of the report that she had to read three times to be sure she’d understood. She felt the blood draining from her face.
“It collapsed into… it collapsed into a black hole? They collapsed the neutron star into a black hole?”
“We believe so,” her father said. “It was precariously balanced, and apparently maintained at that balance point in a way we don’t understand. When more mass was added to the star, it was enough to push it over.” He put a hand over the report and looked into her eyes. “Dr. Okoye and her team saw that there was a danger from that. Do you know what it was?”
“The gamma burst,” Teresa said. “It’s the most energetic event that there is. We’ve seen gamma bursts from other galaxies.”
“That’s correct,” he said, but she couldn’t get her mind around it. “And what do you remember about Tecoma system?”
She drew a blank. She should have known. Should have remembered.
“The star’s rotation put the poles in line with the gate,” he said, gently. “No other system we’ve ever seen has been like that.”
“What happened?” Teresa asked. He took his hand away, letting her read the rest of the report. “We lost two gates?”
“We did,” her father said as if it were a normal thing. “And we saw plumes of gamma radiation coming out on the solar system side of every other ring gate, much the way they did when the Tempest hit the alien station in the ring hub with its magnetic field generator. And…”
It was like hearing that sometimes you woke up in the morning and didn’t have a color anymore. That red could die. Or that three could be shot off the number line. Learning that a gate could be destroyed was like learning that a rule of her universe so basic that she’d never even thought of it as a rule had been violated. If he’d said You actually have two bodies or Sometimes you can walk through walls or You can also breathe rock, it wouldn’t have felt stranger. More displacing.
He raised his eyebrows. What else? She looked at the report. She felt like she was shaking, but her hands looked steady. It only took her a few seconds.
“And the Plain of Jordan failed its transit,” she said. “We lost a ship.”
“Yes,” he said. “That, it turns out, is the critical issue. Here is the decision we have to make. What do we do about it?”
Teresa shook her head, not disagreeing but reaching for some kind of clarity. The scale of the damage was overwhelming. Her father leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers.