“Look,” she said finally, “This gate is as far ahead of any technology we have as a submarine is ahead of a canoe. We know what it does, at least, we know one thing that it does. Unfortunately we don’t have the faintest idea how it does it. I’m just guessing.”
When no one said anything to contradict this, she looked up from the cigarette and sighed.
“Alright. How long does a heavy load hypercast usually last? I’m talking about a multiple DHF needlecast transmission. Thirty seconds, something like that? A minute absolute maximum? And to open and hold that needlecast hyperlink takes the full capacity of our best conversion reactors.” She put the cigarette in her mouth and applied the end to the ignition patch on the side of the packet. Smoke ribboned off into the wind. “Now. When we opened the gate last time, we could see through to the other side. You’re talking about a stable image, metres wide, infinitely maintained. In hypercast terms, that’s infinite stable transmission of the data contained in that image, the photon value of each star in the starfield and the coordinates it occupied, updated second by second in real time, for as long as you care to keep the gate up and running. In our case that was a couple of days. About forty hours, that’s two thousand, four hundred minutes. Two and a half thousand times the duration of the longest needlecast hyperlink event we can generate. And no sign that the gate was ever running at anything other than standby. Begin to get the idea?”
“A lot of energy,” said Hand impatiently. “So what’s this about leakage?”
“Well, I’m trying to imagine what a glitch in a system like that would look like. Run any kind of transmission for long enough, and you’ll get interference. That’s an unavoidable fact of life in a chaotic cosmos. We know it happens with radio transmission, but so far we haven’t seen it happen to a hypercast.”
“Maybe that’s because there’s no interference in hyperspace, Mistress Wardani. Just like it says in the textbooks.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Wardani blew smoke disinterestedly in Hand’s direction. “And maybe it’s because we’ve been lucky so far. Statistically, it wouldn’t be all that surprising. We’ve been doing this for less than five centuries and with an average ‘cast duration of a few seconds, well, it doesn’t add up to much air time. But if the Martians were running gates like these on a regular basis, their exposure time would be way up on ours, and given a civilisation with millennial hypertechnology, you’d have to expect an occasional blip. The problem is that with the energy levels we’re talking about, a blip coming through this gate would probably be enough to crack the planet’s crust wide open.”
“Oops.”
The archaeologue nicked me a glance not much less dismissive than the exhaled smoke she’d pushed at Hand’s Protectorate-sanctioned schoolroom physics.
“Quite,” she said acidly. “Oops. Now the Martians weren’t stupid. If their technology was susceptible to this sort of thing, they’d build in a fail-safe. Something like a circuit breaker.”
I nodded. “So the gate shuts down automatically at the surge—”
“And buries itself under five hundred thousand tonnes of cliff face? As a safety measure, that seems a little counterproductive, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mistress Wardani.”
The archaeologue made an irritable gesture. “I’m not saying it was intended to happen that way. But if the power surge was extreme, the circuit breaker might not have operated fast enough to damp down the whole thing.”
“Or,” said Schneider brightly. “It could just have been a micrometeorite that crashed the gate. That was my theory. This thing was looking out into deep space, after all. No telling what might come zipping through, given enough time, is there?”
“We already talked about this, Jan.” Wardani’s irritation was still there, but tinged this time with the exasperation of long dispute. “It’s not—”
“It’s possible, alright.”
“Yes. It’s just not very likely.” She turned away from Schneider and faced me. “It’s hard to be sure—a lot of the glyphs were like nothing I’d ever seen before, and they’re hard to read, but I’m pretty certain there’s a power brake built in. Above certain velocities, nothing gets through.”
“You don’t know that for certain,” Schneider was sulking. “You said yourself you couldn’t—”
“Yes, but it makes sense, Jan. You don’t build a door into hard space without some kind of safeguard against the junk you’re likely to find out there.”
“Oh, come on Tanya, what about—”
“Lieutenant Kovacs,” said Hand loudly. “Perhaps you could come with me down to the shoreline. I’d like a military perspective on the outlying area, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Sure.”
We left Wardani and Schneider bickering among the rocks, and set out across the expanse of blued sand at a pace dictated largely by Hand’s shoes. To begin with, neither of us had anything to say, and the only sounds were the quiet compression of our steps in the yielding surface underfoot and the idle lapping of the sea. Then, out of nowhere, Hand spoke.
“Remarkable woman.”
I grunted.
“I mean, to survive a government internment camp with so little apparent scarring. That alone must have taken a tremendous effort of will. And now, to be facing the rigours of technoglyph operational sequencing so soon…”
“She’ll be fine,” I said shortly.
“Yes, I’m sure she will.” A delicate pause. “I can see why Schneider is so burned on her.”
“That’s over, I think.”
“Oh, really?”
There was a fractional amusement buried in his tone. I shot him a narrow sideways glance, but his expression was blank and he was looking carefully ahead at the sea.
“About this military perspective, Hand.”
“Oh, yes.” The Mandrake exec stopped a few metres short of the placid ripples that passed for waves on Sanction IV and turned about. He gestured at the folds of land rising behind us. “I’m not a soldier, but I would hazard a guess that this isn’t ideal fighting ground.”
“Got it in one.” I scanned the beach end to end, looking vainly for something that might cheer me up. “Once we get down here, we’re a floating target for anyone on the high ground with anything more substantial than a sharp stick. It’s an open field of fire right back to the foothills.”
“And then there’s the sea.”
“And then there’s the sea,” I echoed gloomily. “We’re open to fire from anyone who can muster a fast assault launch. Whatever we have to do here, we’ll need a small army to keep us covered while we do it. That’s unless we can do this with a straight recon. Fly in, take pictures, fly out.”
“Hmm.” Matthias Hand squatted and stared out over the water pensively. “I’ve talked to the lawyers.”
“Did you disinfect afterwards?”
“Under incorporation charter law, ownership of any artefact in non-orbital space is only considered valid if a rally operational claim buoy is placed within one kilometre of said artefact. No loopholes, we’ve looked. If there’s a starship on the other side of this gate, we’re going to have to go through and tag it. And from what Mistress Wardani says, that’s going to take some time.”
I shrugged. “A small army, then.”
“A small army is going to attract a lot of attention. It’ll show up on satellite tracking like a holowhore’s chest. And we can’t really afford that, can we?”
“A holowhore’s chest? I don’t know, the surgery can’t be that expensive.”
Hand cocked his head up to stare at me for a moment, then emitted an unwilling chuckle. “Very droll. Thank you. We can’t really afford to be satellite-tagged, can we?”
“Not if you want an exclusive.”
“I think that goes without saying, lieutenant.” Hand reached down and idly traced a pattern on the sand with his fingers. “So then. We have to go in small and tight and not make too much noise. Which in turn means this area has to be cleared of operational personnel for the duration of our visit.”